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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.

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 ZEIT newspaper’s online presence receives the BigBrotherAward 2019 in the “Consumer Protection” Category. Firstly, for using advertising trackers and the Facebook Pixel. Second, for the use of Google services in the “Germany Talks” project. This leads to individuals’ political opinions being stored in US servers. Thirdly, for having the succesor project “My Country Talks“ financed by Google. This Faustian pact with one of the biggest data leeches damages journalistic independence.

Again this year we received more nominations than the number of awards we can give. Some of these nominees deserve to be reprimanded at least: Prostitutes Protection Act (Prostituiertenschutzgesetz), Google Impact Challenge and Cashless Festivals.

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.

With more than 500 nominations, the BigBrotherAwards jury has had to manage a record workload this year – a kind of data mining for data protection and civic rights. It is therefore all the more important to point out that “below” the laureates, there are many cases of illegal activities, data greed, but also sheer impudence and carelessness. To make sure that they don’t go completely scot-free, we briefly introduce some of the “unlucky losers” that didn’t quite make it to the “podium of shame”.

The BigBrotherAward in the “Technology” category goes to the “Spies in our Cars”, which look over our shoulders wherever we drive, collecting data, and sometimes even uploading it to the “cloud”. It is difficult to name a culprit: car manufacturers cite legal requirements on the one hand, and on the other hand they point to third-party providers that offer services such as localisation and navigation to the driver. This BigBrotherAward also looks to the future: the planned European distress call system “e-Call” will have to prove in practice that it really has been implemented in a way that respects privacy.