The Big Brother Awards ceremony is an annual event "honoring" the biggest and best snoopers in the Czech Republic. This year's winners include the Czech Police, the Ministry of Finance, the toy manufacturer Mattel and Interior Minister Milan Chovanec.

The award for "long-term snooping" went to the Czech Police for running the automatic vehicle control system. The system works by recording all passing vehicles at selected locations on cameras.

The data is stored at relevant databases, car numbers automatically recognized, with place and date of passage, but also with drivers' pictures. Continuous storage of such data is not linked to any criminal or illegal behavior of the driver, but still each vehicle is recorded.

Hello Barbie

The award for corporate snooping was given to the toymaker Mattel for their doll Hello Barbie, through which it receives, analyzes and transmits verbal communication of child users over the Internet. The goal is keeping a conversation between a child and a doll.

Besides the fact that children's vocalizations are centrally analyzed and accessible, for example, to the parents of a child, it is important to draw attention to the vague security policy that opens the door for the use of voice expressions for various other purposes, but also the vulnerability of the computer system dolls, which can lead to various kinds of abuse, including gaining control over the doll's vocal expressions by a third party to exploit or otherwise manipulate the child.

Ministerial malpractice

The Ministry of Finance retained the award for “best official snooper.” A wide range of nominations were put forward for it this year, but the Ministry's non-transparent snooping in medical data was enough for it to keep the prize.

According to new amendments to laws governing the activities of health insurance companies, such companies should transmit data from their information systems to the Ministry. Moreover, as became clear last year, the Ministry of Finance had already requested health insurance data on millions of individual admissions in 2014, which it gave to a chosen private company, without a written contract, to analyze.

"Besides the questions of why the Ministry of Finance is authorized to require data from insurance companies, and how all this data was transferred by the Ministry of Finance without a written contract and statutory authority into the hands of private companies, it is necessary to draw attention to the usability of such data from the point of view of health services provision competition and reiterate the conflict of interest of the finance minister and health care entrepreneur in one person," the preamble to the award reads.

The Big Brother Awards are held in more than 10 European countries, with the aim of warning against dangers threatening citizens' privacy. The first ceremony in the Czech Republic took place in 2005.