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.