The BigBrotherAwards Germany were launched to encourage public debate about privacy and data protection. It is their purpose to highlight abusive uses of technology and information.

BigBrotherAwards 2013

The German BigBrotherAwards were bestowed on Friday, 12 April 2013 at 18:00 CEST (UTC+0200) in Bielefeld, Germany. For this year's awards, around 200 nominations had reached us and were checked and further researched.

This year’s winners are here: BigBrotherAwards 2013.

All previous winners can be found under their respective years or in our Archive (listings in German).

Starting in 1998, these "negative" or "anti" awards are now presented annually in several countries. The German Big Brother Awards were first presented in 2000. Award "winners" can be companies, institutions and persons who act in a prominent and sustained way to invade people's privacy or leak (personal) data to third parties.

The name was taken from George Orwells negative utopia "1984", which as early as in the late 1940s put forward the author's vision of a future society under total surveillance.

The sculpture for the Big Brother Awards Germany was designed for the first ceremony by Oerlinghausen artist Peter Sommer. It shows a figure tied by a lead band and bisected by a glass pane which is inscribed with a hexadecimal encoding of a passage from Huxley's "Brave New World".

The Big Brother Awards Germany are organised by digitalcourage in Bielefeld, which was formed in 1987 under its original name FoeBuD or association for the Promotion of Mobile and Immobile Public Data Traffic, as one possible translation of the old name goes. FoeBuD became known for being an active member in early citizens' networks such as Zerberus, running its own BIONIC mailbox, the ZaMir peace network, the German manual for the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption software and its monthly talks/events series PUBLIC DOMAIN covering topics between future and technology, science and politics, arts and culture. The name digitalcourage was adopted on the group’s 25th anniversary in November 2012. You can read more details on the digitalcourage story on Wikipedia.

We are always grateful for questions, suggestions and remarks, critical or otherwise: bba@digitalcourage.de