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.

The BigBrotherAwards ceremony 2008

The "Oscars for data leeches" were awarded on Friday, 24 October 2008 at 6 p.m. (18:00 CEST = UTC+2) in Bielefeld, Germany. Find the unlucky winners here.

You are invited to nominate organisations, institutions or persons that you think should receive a BigBrotherAward. Nominations received until 15 July will be considered for the 2009 awards. The (German) nomination form is here.

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 the Bielefeld based FoeBuD association which formed in 1987 for the Promotion of Mobile and Immobile Public Data Traffic, as one possible translation of the 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.

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