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Reprimands in 2019 go to mood tracker apps, Berlin’s Public Transport Company and the Edeka-Center supermarket in Porta Westfalica. A commendation is given to the physicians’ association Freie Ärzteschaft together with IT service provider Jens Ernst.

The BigBrotherAward in 2021 in the category Health goes to Doctolib GmbH, Berlin. In particular, Doctolib offers the scheduling of doctor’s appointments via its platform. These data are processed in violation of confidentiality obligations and are used commercially for marketing purposes according to their privacy agreement.

The BigBrotherAward 2012 in the “Consumer Protection” category goes to Blizzard Entertainment, for various violations of privacy in their online games, such as World of Warcraft. Using recorded data such as time spent playing, hardware characteristics, synchronisation of friend lists, data on gaming behaviour that is publicly available in part (such as: who solved a certain task), personality profiles and character studies can be created. A patent for such an analysis has already been issued in 2007, to a Google employee. Piece by piece, opportunities for data hoarding are expanded in overly long terms and conditions. But an attempt to compel users to use their real names in public was averted by protesting players – at least for the time being.

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.

The company Ancestry.com receives the BigBrotherAward 2019 in the Biotechnology Category for enticing people with an interest in genealogy into submitting saliva samples. Ancestry.com sells genetic data to commercial pharmaceutical researchers, creates a data source prerequisite for genetic screening by the police and enables covert paternity tests, potentially causing familiy drama.

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.

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.