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The Amazon subsidiaries in Bad Hersfeld and Koblenz receive the BigBrotherAward 2015 in the “Workplace” category for conditions in their employment contracts that violate employees’ personal rights. The companies demand that employees consent to processing of their personal data, including health data, in the US. Amazon also reserves the right to determine their employees’ state of health at practically any time, and to do so using doctors nominated by the company.

The crowd-working platforms Amazon Mechanical Turk and Elance-oDesk receive the BigBrotherAward 2015 in the Economy category for realising digital day-labourship. A trend which will not only turn our working environment inside-out. Job nibbles without minimum wages, without health insurance, without vacation entitlement and without solidarity are sold as “freedom”, “flexibility”, and “flat hierarchies”. Elance-oDesk uses a “Team App” to constantly watch keystrokes and mouse movements on the contractor's computer and sends regular screenshots to the client. This is what Elance-oDesk's German CEO Nicolas Dittberner calls “creation of trust”.

We asked our audience again in 2015 which of our “winners” they found especially “impressive, surprising, shocking, or outrageous”.

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).

“Hello Barbie”, represented by the involved manufacturers Mattel and Toytalk, receives the BigBrotherAward in the Technology category. This doll is equipped with a microphone and Wi-Fi. It uses this to record conversations, sends these into the cloud for analysis and comes up with a more or less appropriate response. The dreams and sorrows of young consumers are thus collected on centralised servers. This acoustic surveillance system in the children’s room even sends a daily report to “helicopter parents”. “Hello Barbie” is not (yet) available in Germany.

The BigBrotherAward in the Finance category is given to the fintech company finleap for the fact that over several years, it has wrongly sent information about changes of bank accounts to organisations that have no stake in the process. As a consequence, names, dates of birth and new account numbers have got into the wrong hands. Numerous efforts to make the company aware of the problem have been ignored.