Data protection over the long haul: 25 years of the Big Brother Awards

The Big Brother Awards are currently being presented in Bielefeld. What began in a small cellar in 2000 is now a gala with "polished speeches and music", as the organizer, Digitalcourage, writes. In the midst of many upheavals, the organization remains true to itself: Alexander Dobrindt is the 14th Interior Minister to receive the negative award, this time for a "security package" full of surveillance technologies. It all started 25 years ago with Berlin's Senator of the Interior Eckart Werthebach's expansion of telephone surveillance using so-called IMSI catchers.

But there are also changes to mark the anniversary: in the "Young and Surveilled" category, young people from Teckids will present sketches about the data octopuses in their lives. The use of iPads in schools and the WhatsApp messaging service are being honored because both exclude non-users in their own way. Today's award ceremony will be broadcast as a live stream.

Federal Minister of the Interior Alexander Dobrindt (CSU) is the unfortunate winner in the "Authorities and Administration" category with the new edition of a "security package". The law is intended to enable measures such as biometric data searches via facial recognition on the internet and in social media by the Federal Police and the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees. Another price driver is the review initiated by Dobrindt whether the Gotham software from the US company Palantir can be used nationwide by the Federal Criminal Police Office.

Dobrindt is in good company: in 2019, the Hessian Minister of the Interior Peter Beuth received a Big Brother Award for purchasing the Palantir software under the innocuous name "Hessendata" for 0.01 Euro plus 600,000 Euro in training costs. High praise for Beuth's award came from Nancy Faeser, then a member of the SPD, before she became Federal Minister of the Interior and put together her own "security package", including facial recognition.

There is now a Big Brother Award in the "Newspeak" category. On the 25th anniversary, it is "bureaucracy reduction" that companies are using to call for deregulation in their interests. Whether it is data protection or environmental protection, consumer protection or the Supply Chain Act, the award winners argue that the reduction of bureaucracy must always be used as a cloak for a wide variety of attempts to impose restrictions. This also applies to politics, as can be seen in the USA. In the name of reducing bureaucracy, entire authorities are being dragged down and brought into line with Trump. This is why the Big Brother Award is not going to any company or authority, but will instead be a plea for digital sovereignty in Europe with 450 million people and 23 million companies under the heading "What really makes me angry". "We have to get serious about digital sovereignty! Federal authorities and all important institutions, schools, universities, public utilities, associations and companies must move away from Microsoft, Google and Amazon as quickly as possible," said laudator Rena Tangens.

Working world: Big Brother Award for Amazon

A Big Brother Award for Amazon in the "Working World" category should come as no surprise to anyone. In fact, Amazon Logistics Bad Hersfeld received the award in 2015 for clauses in its employment contracts that violated employees' personal rights and for storing health data in the USA. In 2025, the Working World Prize was awarded for the first time to German courts that ruled in favor of Amazon.

In 2017, the Amazon works council at the logistics center in Winsen an der Luhe turned to the data protection officer of Lower Saxony. The latter found that the performance measurement of the "pickers" interfered with the right to informational self-determination in a "serious manner". The case went before the Hanover Administrative Court. A court hearing was held – on the company's premises. Amazon won the competition because the performance measurement enables "objective feedback". The permanent storage of the data was "necessary for the permanent qualification of employees" and therefore "in the self-interest" of the employees.

In addition to the 10th Chamber of the Administrative Court of Hanover, the 1st Senate of the Federal Labour Court also received a Big Brother Award. It was the last instance to rule on the use of the "People Engine/New HCM" software, which processes personnel data in the USA without the Works Council having any control over the data processing. The case first went to the Fulda Labour Court and then to the Hesse Regional Labour Court. Both courts ruled that the introduction of the software could not be prohibited on the grounds of data protection. The regional court even tried to prohibit the case from going to the Federal Labour Court, which resulted in another lawsuit. In the end, the dispute ended up before the highest court. The court ruled briefly and concisely that the complaint was inadmissible and that no further reasoning was required.

Google also already has two Big Brother Awards in its virtual cabinet, one for "global data collection" and one for "massive manipulation" of the internet advertising market. Google Ireland Limited could pick up the next award in the "Technology" category for the "forced AI Gemini in Android mobile phones". Compared to the old Google Assistant, the award jury was particularly critical of the fact that the new chatbot sneaks into mobile phones via the update function and is difficult to deactivate or set in a privacy-friendly way. In his speech, laudator Frank Rosengart from the Chaos Computer Club gleefully quoted the fact that Google is actually of the same opinion when it says in its privacy policy: "In your conversations, do not provide any confidential information or data that you do not want reviewers to see or that you do not want to be used to improve Google's products, services, and machine learning technologies." "Reviewers" refers to the thousands of poorly paid raters at Google service providers such as GlobalLogic who read and categorize the fragments of chatbot conversations copied to the cloud before AI training.

25 years and counting

The first Big Brother Awards were presented by Privacy International in the UK in 1998. In the course of the Enfopol research, the British eavesdropping station Menwith Hill received a "Lifetime Award". In Germany, the Association for the Promotion of Public Moved and Unmoved Data Traffic (FoeBuD) took on the task of presenting the award winners selected by a jury from 2000 onwards. The jury included members of other IT-critical organizations, such as the Chaos Computer Club and the Förderverein Informationstechnik und Gesellschaft FITUG.

25 years later, many things have changed, but the prizes have remained: FITUG now only exists on the web, FoeBuD has become Digitalcourage and new categories such as "Social Media" have been added to the classic "Working World" and "Technology" awards. While the Big Brother Awards have long since been discontinued in other countries, the Bielefeld gala went on and on, sometimes coupled with other activities: in 2006, around 300 demonstrators marched through Bielefeld city center before the awards gala under the motto "Freedom not Fear". Incidentally, only once in 25 years has a positive prize been awarded for data protection. Whistleblower Edward Snowden received the "Julia and Winston Award" in 2014.

(mack)