Welcome to the German BigBrotherAwards
The BigBrotherAwards Germany were launched to
encourage public debate about privacy and data protection. It is their
purpose to highlight abusive uses of technology and information.
Nominate now for the BigBrotherAwards 2015
We are accepting nominations for the BigBrotherAwards 2015 until Sunday, 18 January 2015. We are curious about and looking forward to your suggestions. Our (German only) nomination page awaits you.
The German BigBrotherAwards gala took place on 11 April 2014 in Bielefeld, Germany. Full English texts of the award speeches can be found here.
This year’s jury was made up with members of Digitalcourage, the Chaos Computer Club (CCC), the International League for Human Rights, and the German Association for Data Protection (Deutsche Vereinigung für Datenschutz, DVD).
Last year’s winners covered came from a wide spectrum, among them Google, German Federal Police, or Apple. You can find them here: BigBrotherAwards 2013.
All previous winners can be found under their respective years or in our Archive (listings in German).
Starting in 1998, these "negative" or "anti" awards are
now presented annually in several countries. The German Big Brother
Awards were first presented in 2000. Award "winners" can be companies,
institutions and persons who act in a prominent and sustained way to
invade people's privacy or leak (personal) data to third parties.
The name was taken from George Orwells negative
utopia "1984", which as early as in the late 1940s put forward the author's
vision of a future society under total surveillance.
The sculpture for the Big Brother Awards Germany
was designed for the first ceremony by Oerlinghausen artist Peter
Sommer. It shows a figure tied by a lead band and bisected by a
glass pane which is inscribed with a hexadecimal encoding of a passage
from Huxley's "Brave New World".
The Big Brother Awards Germany are organised by digitalcourage in Bielefeld, which was formed in 1987 under its original name FoeBuD or association for the Promotion of Mobile and
Immobile Public Data Traffic, as one possible translation of the
old name goes. FoeBuD became known for being an active member in early citizens'
networks such as Zerberus, running its own BIONIC
mailbox, the ZaMir
peace network, the German manual for the Pretty
Good Privacy (PGP) encryption software and its monthly talks/events
series PUBLIC
DOMAIN covering topics between future and technology, science
and politics, arts and culture. The name digitalcourage was adopted on the group’s 25th anniversary in November 2012. You can read more details on the digitalcourage story on Wikipedia.
We are always grateful for questions, suggestions and remarks,
critical or otherwise: bba@digitalcourage.de
