Winners

The BigBrotherAward 2014 in the Workplace category goes to RWE Vertrieb AG (RWE is Germany’s second-largest energy utility company, and RWE Vertrieb is its sales subsidiary). The company makes subcontractors use a surveillance…

We can tell others a lot about ourselves in conversations. What really strips us naked, though, is our metadata. They tell others what we think, plan, and do.

The BigBrotherAward 2014 in the “Business” Category goes to CSC (Computer Sciences Corporation). The company is currently working on commissions by 10 Federal German Ministries on security-related projects, such as the electronic…

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…

The BigBrotherAward 2014 in the category Transport goes to MeinFernbus GmbH (approx.: My Long-Distance Bus, Ltd.) for obliging passengers to always show an official ID along with the travel ticket they booked online. This makes…

The German BigBrotherAward in the Politics Category goes to the Federal Chancellery (Bundeskanzleramt) for their involvement in the NSA surveillance scandal and for their lack of defensive and protective action. One of the…

The BigBrotherAward in the category Politics goes to the Minister-Presidents of the 16 German Federal States for establishing the Joint Licence Fee Service of [Germany’s public broadcasters] ARD, ZDF and Deutschlandradio…

There were some “lucky losers” that didn’t make it to a full award speech, but which should not be left out completely. We also take a look at the current state of things of an award winner from 2011, Facebook.

The BigBrotherAward 2013 in the category “Government and Administration” goes to the Federal Police, represented by its president Dieter Romann, for police identity checks in which people are singled out of crowds on the basis of…

The BigBrotherAward 2013 in the Economics category goes to Deutsche Post Adress GmbH & Co KG. Millions of people in Germany each year supply data about their addresses and house moves to Deutsche Post, in thousands of post offices…

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…

The BigBrotherAward 2013 in the “Workplace” category goes to Apple Retail GmbH in Munich, for their comprehensive video surveillance of employees. The company operates the Apple Stores in Germany. Inside sources say that not only…