Every year Bits of Freedom hands out the Big Brother Awards to spotlight individuals, corporations or governments that have committed gross violations of the privacy and/or freedom of communication of citizens.

About the Big Brother Awards

The Big Brother Awards were named after the totalitarian leader Big Brother in George Orwell’s novel 1984. First organized by Privacy International, the Big Brother Awards are meanwhile given out in many countries, with Bits of Freedom organizing the Dutch edition. Over the years the event has evolved into an entertaining evening show with speeches succeeding reflection and performances.

The public votes for the candidates nominated for the Public Prize, and decides who will hold the title of that year’s biggest privacy breacher. An expert jury selects the winner of the Expert Prize. But we also acknowledge positive developments by awarding the Felipe Rodriquez Award to someone who has made an extraordinary contribution to protecting our rights. Felipe Rodriquez was the founder of the digital civil rights moment in the Netherlands. We fervently hope that he will be an inspiring example to others.

Looking back over the years

The winners of the 2025 edition of the Big Brother Awards  were the Dutch Tax Authorities (Expert Prize) and the National Police (Public Prize). The Tax Authorities accepted the prize for unlawfully using algorithms. The police won for monitoring activists via social media, after which they paid a visit to those activists at their homes, without any legal basis. The positive Felipe Rodriquez Award for privacy advocates went to BOOS (BNNVARA), Bert Hubert and the coalition of The Rights Forum, Plant een Olijfboom and PAX.

The 2024 Big Brother Awards were won by DPG Media (Expert Prize) and the then Minister of Finance Eelco Heinen (Public Prize). DPG Media got the prize for their day-to-day tracking and profiling of millions of news consumers. The Minister of Finance took home the trophy for the policy that indirectly results in privacy breaches and discrimination by financial institutions. Marietje Schaake and Danny Mekić carried off the positive Felipe Rodriquez Award.

In 2023 42% of the public vote went to Dilan Yeşilgöz-Zegerius, the then Minister of Justice and Security. The expert jury voted for the joint nomination of platforms Meta, X en Telegram. Thankfully, there was some good news, too: the Felipe Rodriquez Award for advocates of internet freedom was handed out to not one but five winners that year.

At the 2022 Big Brother Awards ceremony the Public Prize was for Euro Commissioner Johansson, while the Expert Prize was given to the then Minister of Home Affairs Bruins Slot. "Erik", an anonymous whistleblower, won the Felipe Rodriquez Award, which was symbolically accepted by Lousewies van der Laan, director of Transparency International.

In 2021 the Covid pandemic forced us to be creative. As we could not get together in person, we awarded the 2021 Big Brother Awards by video. In an accompanying podcast series we discussed that year’s privacy breachers in more detail.

In 2020 we had to skip the Awards due to the pandemic.

At the fifteenth edition of the Big Brother Awards in 2019 Minister Dekker accepted the Public Prize because of the plans to authorize the CJIB [Central Judicial Collection Agency] to link datasets to make payment profiles of people. The Expert Prize went to SyRI, the profiling system aimed at detecting welfare fraud. The prize was accepted by Carsten Herstel, then Director General Social Security and Integration at the Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment.

In 2018 we came together in De Rode Hoed in Amsterdam to award the Public Prize to the Chamber of Commerce. The reason was the tsunami of mail and telephone calls received by small business owners at their home addresses, thanks to the Chamber of Commerce that had supplied databases with confidential data to anyone willing to pay. The Expert Prize was given out to Hugo de Jonge, then Minister of Healthcare, who came with a legislative proposal providing for the exchange of sensitive patient and client data between dozens of agencies.