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The BigBrotherAward 2013 in the “Workplace” category goes to Apple Retail GmbH in Munich, for their comprehensive video surveillance of employees. The company operates the Apple Stores in Germany. Inside sources say that not only sales rooms and stockrooms in these stores have been monitored across the whole area and at all times, but social rooms as well. This form of total control of employees would be forbidden in Germany. The company is certainly taking an intransigent stance: It took arduous negociations with data protection commissioners until information signs about video surveillance were moved from “dog’s eye” to waist level.

Another BigBrotherAward 2011 in the category “Communication“ goes to Apple GmbH in Munich for taking their customers hostage by way of expensive hardware and subsequently blackmailing them into accepting a questionable privacy policy. If you buy a fancy new iPhone for a few hundred Euros, you also want to actually use it. Customers have virtually no choice but to consent to about 117 iPhone display pages of conditions and privacy policies – or else they can only use their nifty gadget for telephone calls, at most. In particular, users’ localisation or positioning data is highly coveted by “apps” providers and advertisers for the purpose of personalised advertising.

The BigBrotherAward 2011 in the “Workplace” category goes to Daimler AG in Stuttgart for requiring blood tests from their entire production workforce. This kind of modern-day vampirism is practised in disregard of personality rights and mostly without any such need in industrial law. Daimler had originally demanded these blood tests from their administrative employees as well, but this practice has been discontinued. Daimler receive this award as a representative for several German companies that require such blood tests – because the car manufacturer does not consider the blood tests themselves problematic, but the restrictions on medical practice imposed by data protection legislation.

The company Precire of Aachen, Germany receives the BigBrotherAward 2019 in the “Communications” Category for the speech analysis software. Precire is not only used to preselect job candidates, but also by call centres to analyse callers’ emotions.

The organising committee for the soccer World Cup within the German football association (Deutscher Fussballbund, DFB) - represented by Mr Franz Beckenbauer earns a BigBrotherAward for the inquisitorial questions asked in ticket application forms, for their plans of sharing customer data with FIFA and its sponsors, and for the use of RFID spychips in the tickets and thus the attempt to make this surveillance technology acceptable - directly benefiting a World Cup sponsor (RFID producer Philips).

The BigBrotherAward 2008 in the category “Politics” goes to the Ministry of Economy and Technology, represented by Minister Michael Glos, for passing the law about the ELENA procedure und the associated forced introduction of the electronic signature.

Proctorio GmbH receives the BigBrotherAwards 2021 for its offer of “fully automatic exam supervision”, which supposedly facilitates total control of students in online exams. During an exam, the AI-based software is said to be able to recognise eye movements of students that point to an attempt at cheating, which then raises an automatic alarm.