The "main" winners of the first Big Brother Awards in 2000 were the Loyalty Partner company with "Payback", their customer loyalty scheme. In later years, another nationwide "competitor" scheme was featured in the "dishonourable mentions". The Big Brother Award did not push these two data gatherers out of the market. But the awards succeeded in improving customer privacy: Payback discovered data protection and entered into a dialogue with the BBA jury. Happy Digits were less open to cooperation, but again this scheme was subjected to a large amount of critical media publicity, culminating in a less than flattering report from the federal consumer protection board last year. The bad press compelled these two companies to act: Payback have now considerably improved their customer information, and they ask for their customers’ consent to the use of their data in a clearer way. While Happy Digits are still trying to trick their customers with a pre-formulated consent clause that is supposed to hold unless actively deleted, this scheme too has made some improvements about transparency and choice. The jury is continuing to watch this market with great interest.

In 2003 we had a large number of very prominent winners, including the Metro Group for the use of RFID technology in its Future Store and the related implementation of customer profiling, the GEZ ("Fee Withdrawal Centre", which collects the licence fee for radios and TVs to fund public broadcasting) for the way it harasses and snoops on people in order to seek them out as TV or radio set owners, and the US government for the practice of violating data protection guidelines by demanding large amounts of data about air passengers travelling into the country.

The award to Metro was the starting signal for a media campaign on a national level that was probably unprecedented: it succeeded in launching a wide debate about a privacy-threatening technology before this was actually introduced. The award ceremony heralded a campaign led by FoeBuD that included a demonstration, reports in the print and broadcast media and numerous debates. Data protection institutions echoed the criticism in their statements. Politicians were suddenly showing sensitivity. Metro had to call a temporary halt to their RFID plans. The Bridge foundation is supporting the development of RFID detection technology for consumers. And even RFID makers are displaying an awareness and trying to take privacy into account with their latest products, not wanting their technology to fall into disrepute.

Much applause was given to the decision to "honour" GEZ for their decades of snooping. The jury had not expected to stop this just by bestowing the award. But it did manage to get this bureaucratic and absurd machinery into the headlines yet again and expose it to public scrutiny. The broadcasters received the warning and have since moderated their attempts to dig out supposed fee dodgers. But in political circles, which could put a stop to the whole charade by introducing new ways of raising the licence fee, the award has largely been ignored. This will take some endurance. GEZ continue to be a worthy "lifetime" BBA winner. But the current task is to focus the public sensitivity we have been able to raise onto more concrete "cases", such as the planned implementation of RFID in personalised tickets for the 2006 football world championships.

We are now in the fourth year after the 9/11 attacks, and terrorism hysteria in the US is continuing. The agitator George W Bush has not (yet) been voted out of office. But the methods ostensibly introduced to catch terrorists but mostly affecting innocent people are put under increasing doubt. This also applies to the German über agitator Otto Schily (the federal minister of the interior): just over a month after 9/11 he received the main Big Brother Award of 2001, and he deserves it now as much as he did then. Not only the Green Party, the "small" partner in the governing coalition, is taking a distance, his own Social Democratic party is starting to do the same. The revival of the police strategy of "dragnet investigation" (criminal hunt by data mining), for which the interior minister of the state of Hessia received a Big Brother Award in 2002, is now regarded as a dangerous failure by all but the most die-hard "believers". Probably the strongest criticism has been voiced against the US governments’ unchecked gathering of air passenger data, for which they received an award in 2003. The German BBA jury has now found many prominent supporters for its stance against the handover of data to the US and its Homeland Security department: not just EU data protection officials, the European parliament has registered its concerns as well. But this didn’t stop the European commission from making a deal with the US government that involved hardly less data being sent than the US were demanding in the first place. With a recent appeal to the European Court of Justice there is the hope that the judges will also join the BBA jury in condemning this continual violation of basic data protection rights.

You can find more information on previous German Big Brother Awards in the Archive.