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Lifetime Award (2023)

Microsoft

The Big Brother Award 2023 in the category "Lifetime Achievement" goes to Microsoft, because with their market dominance, the company forces people, companies and government agencies to continually transmit data, and therefore to allow themselves to be spied upon, as a regular part of their digital activities. With this award, Microsoft has been honoured in the Lifetime category twice (the first time was in 2002).

Image:Digitalcourage CC-BY 4.0

Digitalisation (2020)

Minister of Education of Baden-Württemberg, Susanne Eisenmann

The education minister of the federal state of Baden-Württemberg, Susanne Eisenmann, receives the BigBrotherAward in the “Education” category because she intends to let Microsoft run essential services of the state’s digital education platform.

Image:Kultusministerium Baden-Württemberg Source

Technology (2018)

Microsoft Germany

Microsoft Germany, represented by Sabine Bendiek, Chairwoman of the Management Board, receives the BigBrotherAward 2018 in the Technology category for implanting telemetry (i.e. the transmission of diagnostic data) in Windows 10 that is almost impossible to deactivate. Even skilled users will hardly be able to stop this data from being transmitted.

Image:Collage von Digitalcourage CC-BY-SA 4.0

Civil Society (2026)

Northern Protestant Church

The Northern Protestant Church forces its parishes to use Microsoft services – and thereby it surrenders sensitive data about its members’ religious and civil activities to the US corporation. This sacrifice if data sovereignty is irresponsible.

Bild: Dirtsc CC-BY-SA 4.0 Quelle; Bearbeitung: Melanie Lübbert

Montage: Grafik zwei Palmen in einer realen Seenlandschaft.

Lifetime Achievement (2022)

Irish Data Protection Commission

The BigBrotherAward 2022 in the category “Lifetime Achievement” goes to the Irish Data Protection Commission, represented by Helen Dixon, for its continued sabotage of efforts to enforce European data protection law. Under the authority’s care, Ireland has become a haven for surveillance capitalism business models by Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Oracle and Salesforce.

Bild: Pixabay, Pixabay License

Eine Europakarte, darüber das Wort „Bürokratieabbau“ in ungewöhnlicher Silbentrennung: Bür, ok, rat, iea, bba, u.

What makes me really angry (2025)

Cutting Bureaucracy

Deregulation is a poisoned word. It suggests a reduction of bureaucracy that benefits us citizens, because everything becomes simpler and the economy is stimulated. But actually, behind this word is a very different development: Large US tech corporations avoid competition and evade rules that were put in place to protect us. Their AI applications steal creative works, flood the net with mindless content and patronise us as chatbots. And all with as little regulation as possible.

Screenshot: openstreetmap.org, Bearbeitung: Melanie Lübbert

Workplace (2016)

IBM Germany

IBM Germany receives the BigBrotherAward 2016 in the “Workplace” Category for the software “Social Dashboard”, which allows companies to control and evaluate their employees' social behaviour. “Social Dashboard” uses metadata from the in-house social network system “Connections” and creates a score and a “social ranking” for likes and shares. It is an attempt at leaving the evaluation of social interactions to a machine. It will create wrong incentives and more pressure at work.

Image:Dan Farber CC-BY-NC 2.0 Source

preventive (2026)

Deutsche Telekom

Deutsche Telekom, the former state telecommunications provider, receives a preventive BigBrotherAward for their plan to merge with T‑Mobile US, their own American subsidiary. This deal – depending on the specifics – could cause German telecommunications infrastructure to become immediately subject to US surveillance legislation, such as: FISA Act 702, Cloud Act, and Executive Order 12333.

Image:Bin im Garten CC-BY-SA 3.0 Source

2002

The 3rd BigBrotherAwards were presented in Bielefeld on October 25, 2002.

Consumer Protection (2018)

Amazon Alexa

Amazon receives the BigBrotherAward 2018 in the “Consumer Protection” category for its nosy, impertinent, all-too clever and gossipy bugging operation in a can by the name of Alexa. It is well known that Alexa’s speech recordings are processed in the Cloud. What is award-worthy is the fact that these recordings are also stored in the Cloud and that they can be played back even months later. That makes it possible to monitor everyone present in the home, and it is unclear who else is given access to the recordings.

Image:padeluun CC-BY-SA 4.0

Im Vordergrund das Wort „Smart Cities“ gefüllt mit Binärcode bzw. sehen die Buchstaben teilweise wie Kameras und Personen aus. Im Hintergrund die Skyline einer Großstadt.

PR & Marketing (2018)

Idea of a “Smart City”

The BigBrotherAward 2018 in the “PR and Marketing” Category goes to the idea of a “Smart City”. The advertising concept of a “Smart City” is used by tech companies to try to sell the idea of a “safe city” to municipal administrations: A city, covered in sensors, under total surveillance, remote-controlled and commercialised. “Smart Cities” reduce their citizens to mere consumers, change consumers into data sources and our democracy into a privatised service.

Image:Dennis Blomeyer Public Domain

2018

The 18th BigBrotherAwards were presented in Bielefeld on April 20, 2018.

Image:Justus Holzberger CC-BY-SA 4.0

About BigBrotherAwards

In a compelling, entertaining and accessible format, we present these negative awards to companies, organisations, and politicians. The BigBrotherAwards highlight privacy and data protection offenders in business and politics, or as the French paper Le Monde once put it, they are the “Oscars for data leeches”.

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