On 6 November the Hungarian Big Brother Awards were presented to the police office of Budapest, to the small company Szabo Gardentechnics and to the under-secretary of the ministry of internal affairs. With the Big Brother Awards governments, companies and people are named and shamed for large scale privacy invasions.
The Budapest police earned the detested award by examining the identity papers of drug addicts that applied for free disposable needles. The Hungarian Data Protection Commissioner explained that the police didn't have a general right to go into the trailer of the Baptists (where the needles were distributed). They could only enter in hot pursuit of a criminal or to prevent someone from committing a crime. The Budapest police was also reproached for needlessly searching young men and women in the street - in name of the fight against drug abuse.
The owner of the small company Szabó Kerttechnika won the award for using the CCTV system for total surveillance of his employees in the office and in other rooms. The video's were stored for more than a week. A personal award was presented to Dr. Zoltán Tóth (under-secretary of the ministry of internal affairs. He backed the idea of a universal chip-card that would store three different kinds of personal identification numbers. Though the Hungarian parliament rejected this proposal, the jury wanted to warn against the fundamental privacy-invasion of the idea.
Pictures of the presentation in Budapest (06.11.2003)
http://home.sch.bme.hu/~bond/peticio/
Schedule worldwide Big Brother Awards
http://www.bigbrotherawards.org/
(Thanks to Dr. Zoltan Galantai, associate professor Budapest University of Technology and Economics)