Winners

The Teckids community criticises social media bans for young people: They protect nobody and do not solve any of the problems. Age checks require that even more personal data are disclosed, and this affects mostly those who want…

The Northern Protestant Church forces its parishes to use Microsoft services – and thereby it surrenders sensitive data about its members’ religious and civil activities to the US corporation. This sacrifice if data sovereignty is…

Germany’s two market-leading highstreet opticians, Apollo Optik and Fielmann, are awarded for selling Ray-Ban/Meta smart glasses. These spying glasses facilitate secret video and audio recording in everyday situations, normalising…

The EU’s legislative project, “Digital Omnibus” is set to erode EU data protection laws, and declare personal data as unowned property. The beneficiaries are Big Tech and the advertising industry: They would be able to appropriate…

Deutsche Telekom, the former state telecommunications provider, receives a preventive BigBrotherAward for their plan to merge with T‑Mobile US, their own American subsidiary. This deal – depending on the specifics – could cause…

The German Interior Ministry wants to turn the Tax ID into a universal personal identifier for all citizens – disguised as “residents register modernisation”. Via this unique identifier, government agencies could create…

In the “young & surveilled” category at the BigBrotherAwards 2025, the youth organisation Teckids points out two problems from young people’s digital life experience.

Deregulation is a poisoned word. It suggests a reduction of bureaucracy that benefits us citizens, because everything becomes simpler and the economy is stimulated. But actually, behind this word is a very different development…

The BigBrotherAward in the Workplace category 2025 goes to the Administrative Court Hannover and the Federal Labour Court for drastic miscarriages of justice in cases against Amazon. The Administrative Court Hannover approved of…

The BigBrotherAward in the Technology category goes to Google for the AI assistant Gemini, which is now clandestinely, but compulsorily installed on Android smartphones. Gemini has access to wide-ranging usage and communication…

The BigBrotherAward 2025 in the category Authorities and Administration goes to the Minister of the Interior Alexander Dobrindt for his so-called Security Package, which envisions wide-ranging use of face-search engines. Dobrindt…

The BigBrotherAward 2025 in the “Social Media” Category goes to TikTok for violations of privacy; spreading of fake news and hate speech; manipulating people with respect to their political convictions, their values and their…