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).
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?
What kind of browser would that be? https://www.bahn.de/ works just fine on Firefox (uBlock and PrivacyBadger) and chromium-based browsers.
I know my settings are pretty strict and I could flick a few switches to allow this and that but it’s besides the point, especially concerning looking up connections and not buying anything.
FF works for me too
Well, Deutsche Bahn offers discounts for people under a certain age, so the question is relevant, at least when you apply for said discount.
If they’re not verifying the age, then surely a checkbox is enough?
Dropdown menu, but yes: