The Big Brother Awards recognize "the government and private sector organizations ... which have done the most to threaten personal privacy". They are named after the George Orwell character Big Brother from the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. They are awarded yearly to authorities, companies, organisations, and persons that have been acting particularly and consistently to threaten or violate people's privacy, or disclosed people's personal data to third parties.
The awards are intended to draw public attention to privacy issues and related alarming trends in society, especially in data privacy. The contest is organized by a nongovernmental organization Iuridicum remedium.
The German Big Brother Awards are organised and hosted by digitalcourage (formerly FoeBuD) in Bielefeld.
Read more about Big Brother Awards: Countries
Famous quotes containing the words big and/or brother:
“The Americans ... have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on an amusing and animated conversation without giving a moment’s reflection to what they are saying and so leave their minds free to consider the more important matters of big business and fornication.”
—W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965)
“It’s perversion. Don’t you see what it is? It’s not natural. To go to great expense for something you want, that’s natural. To reach out to take it, that’s human, that’s natural. But to get your pleasure from not taking, from cheating yourself deliberately like my brother did today, from not getting, from not taking. Don’t you see what a black thing that is for a man to do? How it is to hate yourself?”
—Abraham Polonsky (b. 1910)