Big Brother Awards 2024: the winners
The time has come: the biggest violators of our digital rights in 2024 have been revealed! From four nominees, the people chose the Minister of Finance, who received 40 percent of the votes. The expert jury chose DPG Media.
Public Award: the Minister of Finance
With the Big Brother Awards, Bits of Freedom annually draws attention to individuals, companies, and governments that have significantly violated our privacy and freedom of communication. This year the people chose the Minister of Finance with an overwhelming 40% of votes. The minister wins the award for creating policies that indirectly lead to privacy violations and discrimination by financial institutions. In our view, the minister should prioritize the public interest and no longer provide financial institutions with a perverse incentive to harass and discriminate innocent customers.
Unfortunately, the minister was not present at the award ceremony to accept the award. However, we were able to visit him in The Hague to hand out the Public Award:
Expert Award: DPG Media
According to the jury members, there was no doubt about who should receive the Expert Award: DPG Media. The media company wins because of its practice of tracking and profiling millions of news consumers on a daily basis. This number is expected to grow, as DPG Media is acquiring more and more media brands. Currently, the company owns sixty titles, including De Volkskrant and Algemeen Dagblad, as well as Donald Duck.
Stefan Havik, Chief Digital Officer of DPG Media, accepted the award on the evening itself. He responded:
"We obviously do not feel comfortable with Bits of Freedom awarding this prize to DPG Media. As a local media company, we have been investing for many years in the responsible use of our media users' data. We do feel a social responsibility to distinguish ourselves from the large international tech players. We consider user privacy to be a top priority and will demonstrate that, I promise.
We use data to establish online revenue models that secure the future of local media: quality journalism costs money, and we want everyone in the Netherlands to continue to have access to affordable or even free journalism in the future.
DPG Media and Bits of Freedom both strive for an open and just information society where responsible data use is central and that cherishes quality journalism. We can learn from each other every day, so let’s engage in this conversation in the future."
Positive award for privacy advocates
Fortunately, there was also good news. Each year, we recognize individuals and organizations that have had a positive impact on our digital rights. The Felipe Rodriguez Award - named after one of the founders of XS4ALL and a pioneer of the digital rights movement in the Netherlands - this year was awarded to two winners.
The first winner was Marietje Schaake. Schaake is an internet and privacy expert, author, and former politician. She received the award for highlighting the lack of democratic oversight of Big Tech, through a decades-long career and most recently in her book The Tech Coup.
The second winner was Danny Mekić. Mekić is a legal consultant and author, and won the award for successfully suing X over its shadowbanning practices. Shadowbanning is a method used by social media platforms to limit the reach of posts and accounts without informing the account holder. By taking X to court and winning the case, he demonstrated how to provide counterpower to the powerful Big Tech platforms.
We hope that Schaake and Mekić inspire others to advocate for our freedom of communication and privacy. We also hope that next year we won't have to hand out any Big Brother Awards. A year without violations would be fantastic, right?