Big Brother Award for Smart Glasses: Fielmann and Apollo receive an award for stalkerware PERRFRIST 6 p.m

One of the negative prizes for surveillance this year goes to the optics chains Fielmann and Apollo Optik. The two retailers received the Big Brother Award, presented by the civil rights organization Digitalcourage, for the sale of smart glasses from the IT group Meta. “Smart glasses are simply disguised listening devices, disguised stalkerware,” said laudator Elisabeth Niekrenz, lawyer at Spirit Legal, when introducing the award winners.

Digitalcourage presents the negative Big Brother Awards annually. The prizes go to companies, people and institutions that are particularly negative in their surveillance projects or in their handling of personal data. Last year, Tiktok and Google were among those affected, but Deutsche Bahn and the payment service Klarna were also among the award winners.

Smart glasses have been around for a long time. After the first models looked a bit like a dystopian science fiction film and sales were rather slow, Meta has now won over the manufacturer Ray Ban, known for stylish sunglasses, for its glasses. In practice, it is now difficult to distinguish whether someone with glasses is wearing smart glasses. Accordingly, it is difficult for outsiders to see if someone is discreetly filming or taking photos with it. The lighting up of an LED should indicate that the recording function is being used. However, reports from users suggest that the LED can be manipulated and used to disguise recordings.

Without the knowledge that they are being filmed or photographed, those affected would have no way of defending themselves against it, criticizes lawyer Niekrenz: “For this reason, it is no surprise at all that these devices are particularly used by stalkers and pick-up artists.” Pick-up artists are people, especially men, who hope to get women, in particular, to consent to sexual acts by learning and applying manipulation techniques. Smart glasses are the perfect tool to exploit women in particular on online platforms as sexualized content for clicks and likes, says Niekrenz.

While smart glasses have long been a toy from the tech niche, their sale in common optics retail chains marks a crossing of boundaries, according to Niekrenz: It normalizes a meticulous record of everyday life - and provides the Meta Group with data about the offline world that the group does not have so far: about life in the respective location, about interior spaces such as fitness studios and swimming pools and the people who are out and about there.

“Fielmann and Apollo Optik are receiving this award because, as the two market-leading opticians in Germany, they take these devices out of the tech niche and do business with this stalkerware,” explains Niekrenz.

The two retail chains left a query from the taz unanswered. Just last week, Meta pointed out that the LED light for the second generation of devices had been made brighter. A software update should also ensure that if the LED is covered or destroyed, it is detected and the camera is subsequently deactivated. When it comes to the question of which groups of people and for what purposes the smart glasses are (mainly) used, the company stated that it could not share any data.

Federal Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt (CSU) will once again receive a Big Brother Award this year for the plan to make the tax ID a universal personal identification number, as well as the EU's digital omnibus. According to critics, various changes to the law undermine data protection rules.

The Protestant Northern Church receives the negative price for the use of Microsoft products, and Telekom for considerations of merging with T-Mobile US, which could mean that data from local customers could come under surveillance by US authorities. The award, given by the youth and technology initiative Teckids, goes to the social media age limit. The initiative compares the situation to an amusement park with an unsafe roller coaster: instead of closing it or making it safe through repairs, an attempt is being made to lock young people out of the amusement park.