New Media Awards 2005 Weblog

Recent studies conducted by Forrester Research suggest the people behind the Big Brother Awards aren’t as paranoid as some might think. Companies have become so concerned with inappropriate and dangerous use of company e-mail that nearly half of all large American companies employ people to screen outgoing e-mails. Many companies do not only employ someone to screen outgoing e-mail, but also to alter its content if necessary.

Senior staff are extremely weary over wasteful private uses of e-mail as well as leaked classified materials and trade information. Many executives justify the invasive policy as a legal and financial necessity. Questionable, perhaps, although recent insider trading scandals do lend a bit of legitimacy to their claims.

Nonetheless, the trend of e-mail monitoring is still disconcerting, especially since it is other humans who do the monitoring. A wealth of information, the information these companies are trying to protect, will be available to these people. If monitors prove to be untrustworthy it will be a great liability for the companies that employ them. In the end it is doubtful whether e-mail monitoring will solve any of the problems it is intended to, it may even create more.

London’s streets were deserted last night as the glitterati flocked to the London School of Economics to celebrate the 2004 Big Brother Awards.

Organised by the human rights watchdog Privacy International and hosted by comedian Mark Thomas, the Awards set out to honour the individuals and organisations that have “done the most to invade personal privacy in Britain", and as such provide an insight into the other side of new media technology not covered by our own New Media Awards. Popular (or should that be unpopular?) past winners have included the Association of Chief Police Officers and 60s-loving Home Secretary David Blunkett.

This year’s winners ranged from government figures to the US Department of Homeland Security. Privacy International’s Director, Simon Davies, said the results reflected the “broad and intensified assault on the right to privacy in the UK". Margaret Hodge MP, Minister of State for Children, picked up the Worst Public Servant Award for “her patronage of the controversial tracking provisions in the Children Bill and…determination to develop a wide spectrum of intrusive databases and information systems". The NHS’s plans to computerise all its patient records won it the Most Appalling Project prize, whilst British Gas was celebrating after clinching the Most Invasive Company Award. The Office of National Statistics’Citizen Information Project, which collates information on the entire population, won it the Most Heinous Government Organisation Award.

The big prize of the night, usually reserved for David Blunkett, was the Lifetime Menace Award, which this year went to an entry from across the Atlantic. The US government’s US VISIT scheme, which will fingerprint all visitors to the country from next month, won home for being “offensive and invasive, and…undertaken with little or no debate or scrutiny".

The Awards have been running since 1998, and are now a fixture in the social calendar of seventeen countries worldwide. One hopes that they might, in their own way, raise awareness about the diminishing levels of privacy that we as citizens face today.