First Big Brother Award in the Netherlands

Dutch Government big winner in the big-brother awards for assaults on privacy

The Dutch government was the big winner of the first Big Brother Awards in the Netherlands, last Friday. The governmental institute on health and environment RIVM, under-minister of Transport and Waterways Monique de Vries and the government-related research institute TNO got the prices for the biggest assault on privacy during the last years.

The Health Institute RIVM got the award for the archiving of a million of blood samples of children, without telling the parents and without any legal basis for doing so. Research Institute TNO got the price for the development of aggression detection software. This software can, with the help of camera's, detect 'aggressive' people in a crowd. TNO presented its new toy by showing video pictures of the mass demonstrations in Belgrade that forced Milosevic to resign. A representative of TNO who was present to accept the award however said his company only developed tools. The manner in which the tools were used was not the responsibility of TNO, but of political rules.

Under-minister Monique de Vries got the award for breaking up a compromise on the European Directive for the protection of privacy in the telecom branch. After the attacks of 11th September De Vries stated, along with Great Britain, that new deliberations were necessary to check if the 'balance between privacy and the struggle against terrorism was right'.

A fourth Big Brother Award was given to the commission Mevis, who advised the government to give the police more capabilities to get hold of personal data hold by companies and institutes. According to the commission Mevis, a court order should not longer be necessary for the police to ask companies or institutes to hand over personal data.

Journalist Lex van Almelo stated that the Netherlands missed a real privacy movement. The discussion on the need to protect privacy has a great lack of impact, because the danger to privacy is only formulated in an abstract way. He urged for better achievements of the Dutch privacy groups, by making clearer what the concrete dangers are of the assaults on privacy. A first step could be to call for an obligation of the government and companies to give each citizen every year a survey of the data they held on them, and what's been done with the data.