Big Brother Award 2024: The usual suspects

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The gala event for the Big Brother Award is about to begin in Bielefeld. Companies and authorities that do not take data protection seriously will receive an award and be honored with a laudatory speech. But that's not all: at the event, which has been moved back to the fall, a philosophical concept will be honored for the first time.

Lauterbach's health data utilization law

The Big Brother Awards have been held for 24 years. A small anniversary can be celebrated in 2024: Exactly 20 years after the award winner Ulla Schmidt, her former colleague and current health minister Karl Lauterbach will receive the award in the health category. The prize is in recognition of the implementation of the Health Data Use Act, which he drove forward to open up Germany to the European Health Data Space (EHDS). It is not the primary purpose of "health data", the diagnosis and treatment of diseases, but the secondary purpose that is a thorn in the side of the jury. This was also criticized at the Chaos Computer Congress at the end of 2023.

Laudator Thilo Weichert criticized the use of health data as research data as unconstitutional. Ultimately, the law would lead to the abolition of medical confidentiality, as doctors also fear. Although it is possible to object to the use of data stored in an electronic patient record (EPR) for research purposes by prohibiting the transfer of the EPR data to the national research data center (RDC), nothing more is possible. There are no rights of access or objection for the pseudonymized data stored in the RDC. It is therefore not possible to object if the data becomes AI training data, for example. "There are no precautions against my data being used for military research to increase the effectiveness of certain warfare agents," warns Weichert. This should be a legislative matter of course.

Encroaching technology

While it should be a matter of course to award a prize to a ministry that is allowed to carry out its own data analyses with the FDZ data, the negative prize for a philosophical concept has no addressee. The prize for overreaching paternalism thus remains somewhat cloudy. It is probably best explained using the example of a health app that bullies its users when they eat chocolate. The concept of technological paternalism emerged when researchers began working on the Internet of Things. Kettles that beep incessantly, as well as soccer with an integrated chip for goal-line technology, are the results of this paternalism for the Big Brother jury.

One can have doubts about public transport that flashes and beeps when doors close. After all, there are technical guidelines that state that consideration must be given to blind or deaf passengers. The idea of an app-free cell phone based on the AI interface Natural by Brain, presented by Deutsche Telekom at MWC Barcelona in the spring, is also technology-paternalistic. The manifesto for a new digital economy, which Digitalcourage co-signed as the organizer of the Big Brother Awards, shows how this paternalism can be ended. Which explains the prize for a concept.

Unrivaled Saxony Police

A real classic, on the other hand, is the prize for surveillance technology, which the Saxon police won almost without competition with the use of the Personal Identification System (PerIS). In order to circumvent prohibited real-time surveillance without cause, the trick of retrospective surveillance was devised. The material is evaluated "later", although "later" was not defined. "A delay of a few seconds is probably enough to avoid working in real time," explains laudator Frank Rosengart from the Chaos Computer Club.

A similar trick had already been found in the license plate scanner Kesy, with which the Brandenburg police won the Big Brother Award in 2020. The award was topped two years later by a ruling from the Frankfurt (Oder) Regional Court that the permanent measure was unlawful. The situation is similar in Saxony. Here, the Constitutional Court is to review the admissibility of the system, whereupon PerIS was stopped in its current form. Nevertheless, Saxony's Minister of the Interior, Armin Schuster, is delighted to receive a Big Brother Award because "as a PerIS pioneer, he has given us a taste of what we could soon expect in the EU if the governing parties do not significantly restrict the use of biometric checks."

The railroads make it impossible

Deutsche Bahn is also a real pioneer. It was already present at the very first award ceremony in 2000 and received the award for video surveillance in the DB train station area based on Hartmut Mehdorn's 3S concept. This time, it won in the mobility category because it is "using digitalization to gradually make itself completely impossible". Railcards have migrated to smartphones, the phone number of which must be entered at the travel center when purchasing saver or super saver tickets – at the ticket machine is no longer possible. The Deutschland-Ticket from Deutsche Bahn is also only available electronically.

Finally, there is the "DB Navigator" rail app and a complaint by Digitalcourage against the use of many trackers in this app, which cannot be switched off. At the end of the digitalization chain comes the train attendant's smartphone and the ticket inspection. Here, an app called Mosaik ensures that the journey of all passengers can be tracked. According to the jury, traveling across the country undetected and in an environmentally friendly way is almost impossible. "Why is it important to be able to move around our country undetected? Because as citizens, we are first and foremost the sovereign of this state and not a mobility shifting mass, suspicious case or marketing object," said Padeluun from Digitalcourage in his laudatory speech.

Chinese low-cost companies

The Chinese trading platforms Temu and Shein, which land between 400,000 and 500,000 parcels a day in Liège, Belgium, and use them to trick customs, produce a very special kind of displacement mass. This also puts German customers at risk of being prosecuted by customs for counterfeiting or other breaches of intellectual property rights. However, they mainly receive Big Brother Awards for their data protection guidelines and general terms and conditions, which limit customer rights to the maximum – if they are comprehensible at all.

When the lawyer and laudator Peter Wedde examined the relevant declarations on the Temu and Shein websites, he found a lot of inaccurate wording such as "Contract language is Germany". In the case of Shein's consent to data processing, he found an Italian text together with the response options "Gestione dei cookie", "Alle ablehnen" and "Accept". Both trading platforms point out in their compliance passages that they have a legal obligation to the Chinese state. Shein, for example, states "We have the right to disclose your personal data to fulfill a legal obligation". This contradicts the European GDPR, which sets strict limits on the processing of customer data from Germany in China. Reason enough to present the two controversial providers with a Big Brother Award.

(nen)