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Mr Otto Schily, former Federal Minister of the Interior of Germany earns a BigBrotherAward for the current undemocratic introduction of the biometric passport, the technology of which is still immature and unsafe and which causes the whole population to be subjected to a police identification procedure normally applied to criminals. Mr Schily will receive the BigBrotherAward also for his Lifetime Achievement, namely for the extension of the German and European surveillance system, to the severe cost of civic and freedom rights, and for his persistent efforts at eroding data protection under the guises of public security and fight against terror.

Again this year we have had more nominations than we could recognise with an award. Some of those nominated deserve to be reprimanded at least.

The company Prudsys receive the BigBrotherAward 2017 in the “Consumer Protection” category because they offer software that facilitates price discrimination. This software sets a price according to what it can find out about the individual customer, not according to a product’s value. As a consequence, two different people may have to pay a different price for the same product.

The BigBrotherAward in the "Business and Consumer Protection" category goes to Tchibo for the practice of forwarding their customers' data to the marketing company Arvato / AZ Direct.

The conference of interior ministers of the German federal states receives the BigBrotherAward 2020 in the “Historical Amnesia” Category for their intention to create a life-long personal identification number based on the tax identification number. Such personal identification numbers were used in two dictatorships on German soil: in Nazi Germany and in the East German GDR – for registration, repression and in the end for extermination. They violate the spirit of the constitution.

Google receives the BigBrotherAward 2021 for recently exposed large-scale manipulations of the Internet advertising market, for starving creators and media and for dispossessing our digital personalities.

The BigBrotherAward 2007 in the “Business” category goes to Deutsche Bahn AG (German Railways PLC), represented by its CEO, Hartmut Mehdorn, for their systematic endeavours to make anonymous travelling practically impossible: abandoning ticket counters, ticket machines not accepting cash, personalised ticket selling on the internet, birth date and photo as mandatory items for buying the discount pass (BahnCard), ubiquitous video surveillance, an RFID chip in the all-inclusive one-year ticket (BahnCard 100) without customers being informed, and much more.