Audience Award 2006

For the first time at the German Big Brother Awards, the audience was asked to decide which of the winners should receive the audience award.

Almost half of about five-hundred guests at the gala returned a vote. After the count, we can announce that the audience award, with thirty-two percent of the votes, goes to our winner in the Consumer Protection category, the Association of German  Insurers, for its “warnings and indications” database, which insurances use to exchange substantial amounts of data about millions of citizens — with undisclosed criteria, without sufficient legal foundation, and unknown to the people affected.

Many of our “voters” have used the opportunity to state reasons for their choice. Here is a selection of these reasons:

Authorities & Administration

• It's terrible that the data is collected about people who can’t fight against it because they’re so young.
  
• So data abuse doesn’t need a defined objective or justification any more!!
  
• Registering pupils’ identities is placing an impermissible burden on their future lives, and it doesn’t sufficiently consider the fact that youthful transgressions can “fade out” later.
• Because of this unreflected legislation that will get the next generations used to registration and surveillance from their early days. This surely will make future laws much easier …

Politics I

• Reaching home with haste and dread; in their arms – freedom was dead. [Adaptation from Goethe’s “Erlkönig”]
  
• Because, as was said, this is against the constitution. (And that stands, right?)
• It makes clear what “democrats” our parliamentarians are, so afraid of the people that have to monitor them all over the place – and without justification.

Politics II

• One Gestapo* is enough! [* the “Secret State Police” of Nazi Germany]
  
• George Orwell is looming! I don’t want a surveillance state!

Consumer Protection

• To put it ironically: the great thing is that even people that have no connection to the loss and have not signed any contract, but only wanted to help (such as witnesses) can be affected.
• The insurers’ database is the most brazen, secretive and perhaps most clearly illegal “project” among the awards.
• The necessary legal foundations contradict established legal principles. Law students are taught in their first semester that such actions are illegal!
• I was shocked how far the lobbies’ influence can reach and the consequences for insured people can go, it’s just shameless!
• Insurances affect every part of our lives. The criteria for inclusion in the database are not known and there is no way to inspect or erase one’s data, the consequences can last a lifetime.

Business

• Next to the massive invasion of privacy, it simplifies industrial espionage by international companies.
• Because my bank details are not even any of my mother’s business.
• I hardly trust my own state any more – even less so a foreign one!
• Staggering, outrageous, most of all I’m almost sick with rage about all of these criminal activities alike.