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The BigBrotherAward in the “Mobility” category goes to Deutsche Bahn, Germany’s major railway company, which does everything conceivable to make trail travel without surveillance impossible. Digital coercion is always increased: More and more tickets can only be bought in digital and personalised forms, the Bahncard discount card was abolished in its physical form. Passengers are pressed to us the “DB Navigator” app, which users trackers that can not be rejected.

The BigBrotherAward in the Communications category goes to Zoom Video Communications, Inc., which as a US-based company is obliged to share data with intelligence services, but still claims to be in compliance with the GDPR. Since a relevant part of its development takes place in China, Zoom is also subject to Chinese control and censorship. The award also goes to all organisations, in particular those working on human rights, the environment and the climate crisis, who use Zoom and therefore expose their participants to surveilance, even though free and privacy-friendly alternatives are available.

The Federal Ministry of Health, represented by the current minister of Health, Hermann Gröhe, receives the BigBrotherAward 2015 in the “Consumer Protection” category. With its “e‑health” projects, the ministry has severely threatened and jolted patient–physician confidentiality. At the same time, billions of Euros are being redistributed from the health sector into the pockets of listed corporations. It is not patients but the financial sector that is getting healed. The electronic health card, which received a BigBrotherAward in 2004, was only a part of this scheme.

Federal Minister of the Interior, Thomas de Maizière, and former Federal Minister of the Interior, Hans-Peter Friedrich receive the BigBrotherAward in the Politics category for systematically and fundamentally sabotaging EU plans for a General Data Protection Regulation. Instead of taking Germany’s high level of protections into the EU negotiations, as they vowed to do, both Interior Ministers oversaw their ministry’s civil servants perverting European data protection into the opposite, and to do so in close cooperation with lobbyists. Past achievements such as data minimisation, informed consent, and limiting data use to specific purposes, are set to be practically abolished.