Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2000/10/27/apache_wins_big_brother_award/

Apache wins Big Brother award

Joins Doubleclick on privacy abusers' roll-call

By Valerie Thompson

Posted in Legal, 27th October 2000 13:56 GMT

The Apache Consortium, producers of the world's most popular Internet server software, sucks when it comes to privacy. So much so that it won a Big Brother award for it's "irresponsible default settings".

Yes folks, its Big Brother Awards time again. The brainchild of Privacy International,a London-based human organisation ceremonies were held simultaneously last night in Germany, Austria and Switzerland to dish out awards to government agencies, companies and initiatives considered by juries in each country to have done the most to invade personal privacy.

This year's roll of dishonour includes:


None of the winners showed up to accept their award.

Previous winners include: Doubleclick in the US for monitoring the surfing of 50 million Internet users and TransUnion for selling credit reports to marketers and keeping inaccurate records for years.

Another notable awardee from the past is Harlequin, in the UK, developer of the WatCall telephone traffic analysis system. This enables police to analyse telephone records to create "friendship networks" linked to existing police intelligence systems to automatically target people who are "of interest". The activity takes place without the issue of any warrant. ®