Data protection Media Prize DAME 2023These are the winners of the 2023 Data Protection Media Prize
The DAME Data Protection Media Prize was awarded for the seventh time this year. It was initiated by the Professional Association of Data Protection Officers in Germany (BvD). The DAME Data Protection Media Prize is now being continued by the non-profit organization privacy4people. klicksafe is a cooperation partner of the DAME Prize. On May 28, 2023, the three winners were announced at the award ceremony in Berlin.
These are the winners of the DAME 2023
Winner of the competition
Katharina Brunner and Elisa Harlan with the cross-media data analysis "We are the raw material of AI"
In their data analysis for Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR), Katharina Brunner and Elisa Harlan explore the question of how crawlers collect images and texts from millions of websites as training data for AI systems. A team of data journalists examined the largest publicly accessible AI training dataset, which is the basis for image generators such as Stable Diffusion. It consists of more than 5.8 billion references to images and their descriptions from the internet. The preliminary work for this was carried out by the open network LAION. The abbreviation stands for Large Scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network and is an association of volunteers mainly from Europe and North America. The British company Stability AI paid for LAION and a research group from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich to provide the necessary computing power. The result of the research: the data contains a lot of sensitive and private information such as nude photos, bank details and exact details of where a photo was taken. Many of those affected are not aware of this, the authors found. And they show how AI companies respond to requests to delete private images on the basis of the GDPR.
Best contribution youth
Helene Reiner, Lenja Hülsmann, Marco Lehner and Bianca Taube from the News-WG with the video "Enkeltrick 2.0 fraud with AI"
Fraudsters pretend to be family members in an emergency and demand money from their victims. The use of publicly available data and the increasing use of AI or intelligent software tools that can reproduce voices deceptively real make these scams particularly convincing. In their Instagram video, Helene Reiner, Lenja Hülsmann, Marco Lehner and Bianca Taube from the News-WG of Puls, the youth network of Bayerischer Rundfunk, show how easy it is to imitate a voice, how dangerous the new grandchild trick can be for potential victims and how to protect yourself and your loved ones from it.
Best print contribution
Holger Fröhlich with the article "Im Spinnennetz"
In his article for the business magazine "brand eins", author Holger Fröhlich focuses on the "shadow market of online advertising" and the practices of AdTech companies. He comes to the conclusion that the industry allows itself unprecedented automated tracking and evaluation of online behavior. Fröhlich is convinced that this will not change in the near future, despite EU initiatives. This is despite the fact that most people are aware of how sophisticated the trade in our data has become.
