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US company and campaign platform change.org receives the BigBrotherAward 2016 in the Economy category for its business model of marketing personally identifiable information of signatories together with their political statements. Change.org appears to be an progressive and social project, but it really is a for-profit US corporation which shows many deficiencies with respect to data protection law. For example, it continues to store user data in the USA although the Court of Justice of the European Union has declared the “Safe Harbor” Framework invalid.

The BigBrotherAward 2013 in the Category „Global Data Acquisition“ goes to Google Inc., Mountain View, USA. Under the guise of a search engine and other free-of-charge services, such as Maps, Docs and YouTube, the advertising company Google collects real-time data about everything and everyone, wherever they go, and classifies people for its own profit. Google disregards European law and uses its monopoly to advance the technocratic ideology of an all-knowing supercomputer, which has a better idea of what people want than the people themselves.

The company BrainCo receives the BBA in the “Education” category for its EEG headbands, which can allegedly measure students’ attention by their brain activity. The attention level is signalled by an LED on the headband and radioed to the teacher’s computer. In the US and China this technology is already used in classrooms. The second awardee is the Leibniz Science Campus Tübingen, which is trialling similar headbands in Germany, combined with eye tracking. That is dressage rather than education.

The German IT business association Bitkom receives the BigBrotherAward 2017 in the “Business” category for their uncritical promotion of big data, for obtrusively lobbying against data protection, and for being a front organisation for big US companies, who call the shots within Bitkom.