Winners

The German Federal Military (“Bundeswehr”) and the Federal Minister of Defence receive the 2017 Big Brother Award in the category Authorities and Administration for the military’s massive digital arms build-up including the new…

The Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (DİTİB) receives the BigBrotherAward 2017 in the “Politics” category because imams at DİTİB – acting for the Turkish government and its secret service MİT – are said to have…

At the end of the BigBrotherAwards gala 2016, we gave our audience their say as usual. Our guests could et us know in a vote which of the awards they found especially “impressive, surprising, shocking, or outrageous”. The result…

Jan Philipp Albrecht is the EU politician thanks to whom we now have a real chance for data protection in Europe. For this, he and his team deserve words of praise at the 2016 BigBrotherAwards.

BVG, the Public Transport Company in Berlin, receive the BigBrotherAward 2016 in the Technology Category for the “VBB Fahrcard”, a contactless chipcard also known as “(((eTicket”.

Again this year we received more nominations than the number of awards we can give. Some of these nominees deserve to be reprimanded at least: Prostitutes Protection Act (Prostituiertenschutzgesetz), Google Impact Challenge and…

The BigBrotherAward 2016 in the Newspeak category goes to the word “Datenreichtum” (data opulence / data maximisation).

The Generali insurance company is awarded the BigBrotherAward 2016 in the category Consumer Protection because it promises advantages to the insured if they use an app to transfer their fitness data and shopping behaviour to the…

The interior secret service known as “Protection of the Constitution” receives a Lifetime BigBrotherAward just as it reaches the official retirement age, for 65 years of violating civil and privacy rights. The “Protection of the…

US company and campaign platform change.org receives the BigBrotherAward 2016 in the Economy category for its business model of marketing personally identifiable information of signatories together with their political statements…

IBM Germany receives the BigBrotherAward 2016 in the “Workplace” Category for the software “Social Dashboard”, which allows companies to control and evaluate their employees' social behaviour. “Social Dashboard” uses metadata from…

In 2014 we continued our tradition of asking our audience which of the awards they regarded as particularly “impressive, surprising, shocking, or outrageous”.