Big Brother Awards France (BBA-F)
Every year, Privacy International and partners, in a dozen of countries, give the “Orwell Awards” to institutions, companies or persons who promote monitoring and control of people or violate the privacy.
In 2007, special mention to Google Inc., winner overall:
Google collects personal data worldwide (without respect of the U.E laws) , filters the search engine for several countries, censures some results having political connotation, has a loss of objectivity when displaying the news. And Google continue : the company plans to collect DNA worldwide.
I was very impressed by nominees, having relations with DNA stuff.
I saw an award given to Claude Journes, Lyon II University president. In this university, a private company has worked on monitoring products, and the students were the first testers.
Then an award to Pr Philip Gorwood, researcher at Inserm: the main reason was to know if the genes could predict the behavior. He used some methods to conduce students to give their DNA and some informations about their parents.
Finally in the ‘Voltaire price’, the winner is the group “Refus ADN”, for all the work they did against arbitrary samples of DNA, taken during common law cases.
In the same category, a group of breeders were opposed to the obligations ( issued from the U.E ) to implant RFID (spy)chips in the cattle. Their argument : “it begins with animals, then it will continue with humans.”
Another award took my attention: it concerns the companies Sirehna and Taser France , providing and trivializing products having a military origin, to control and monitor (in stealth mode) civilians (like UAV).
“1984″ is in the past… “Big brother has been watching us for many years”
Source : http://bigbrotherawards.eu.org/
