French operator SNCF has previously asked passengers to self-declare as ‘Monsieur’ or ‘Madame’.
The EU’s top court ruled on Thursday that requiring rail passengers to declare a gender when buying a ticket is in breach of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Their mistake was not to add the “prefer not to say” option, now they can’t collect any gender stats.
The Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) ruled against French rail operator SNCF, which has previously required passengers to self-declare as either “Monsieur” or “Madame” when booking train tickets online, deeming it unnecessary information under the GDPR.
The case was brought by the French association Mousse, whose mission is to “campaign for justice for the LGBTQI+ community,” according to its website.
Holy crap, what evil company would let this make it to court?
When a queer NGO asks you to please allow folks to book a train without entering a gender, just fucking make that change.
Ignoring them and having to go to court over it is absurd.
Wonder if it was a weird cost thing, like it’s ridiculously difficult/costly to change their ticketing infrastructure to cope with this?
That’s good news I guess? Curious to see how things develop with Germany’s Deutsche Bahn.
It’s a similar story there. For online tickets on Deutsche Bahn they ask questions about gender too, but you can choose a third “neutral” option. Age is another one, so they basically can tell precisely who you are with additional info as you also have to give them your name which is like… wtf I just want to go from A to B, just let me buy a stupid train ticket!!
Another thing that bugs me is how difficult it is to use public transport without installing some Apps either to pay or to navigate, look for connections. Even outside of that, it’s impossible to open Deutsche Bahn Website in my Browser, which is kinda, well… let’s say it does not serve the idea of “public” transport, which should be to serve the general public, easy access and no data harvesting madness including google maps. I’m so sick of it.
At least there are still a few solutions for this, but the trend is to encourage more people to “just” use the Apps I think, which is probably the biggest issue I have with this as too many just fall for it without thinking twice.
Austria is better in this regard, I can just buy tickets for where I want to go to, but the ÖBB website is similarily shit if not worse to use. At least they don’t ask for info nobody needs to know.
Sorry if this went a bit off-topic, but I would be interested hearing about other countries in the EU? I guess this is a widespread phenomenon?
Age is another one […]
Well, Deutsche Bahn offers discounts for people under a certain age, so the question is relevant, at least when you apply for said discount.
it’s impossible to open Deutsche Bahn Website in my Browser,
What kind of browser would that be? https://www.bahn.de/ works just fine on Firefox (uBlock and PrivacyBadger) and chromium-based browsers.
Now do Ryanair too:)
Chere SNCF, je suis eune mondame, comme mon genre est non-binaire! [Liebe SNCF, ich bin eine “mondame” [Geschlechtsneutrale Alternative zu madame/monsieur, entsprechend Herr*in], da mein [soziales] Geschlecht nicht binär ist!]
Englisch: Dear SNCF, I am a “mondame”, due to my gender being non-binary!
