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(CN) — Customers don’t need to say if they are a Mr. or a Ms. when buying train tickets, the European Union’s highest court ruled on Thursday.
The Court of Justice of the European Union found that collecting data on passengers’ gender was not “objectively indispensable” to booking a ticket and therefore does not comply with the EU’s data privacy legislation.
The French Council of State referred the case to the Luxembourg-based court in 2021, after human rights organization Mousse launched proceedings against ticket service SNCF Connect. Mousse had complained to the company, which sells railway tickets across Western Europe, that the mandatory collection of gender information violated the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR.
The 2018 EU regulation requires organizations to only collect personal data that is “adequate, relevant and limited to what is necessary.”
Mousse first filed a complaint with French privacy watchdog National Commission for Information Technology and Civil Liberties. The data regulator rejected the group’s concerns, concluding the collection of the information didn’t violate GDPR. Mousse then appealed to the Council of State.
The five-judge panel was not satisfied that requiring customers to indicate if they were “Mr.” or “Mrs.” (“Monsieur” or “Madame” in French) was needed for train tickets. Collecting gender information “does not appear to be objectively indispensable or essential in order to enable the correct performance of a contract and, therefore, cannot be considered necessary for the performance of this contract,” the court wrote in the decision which is only available in French.
SNCF argued that they needed the information to send personalized communications to their customers.
The judges, however, were not satisfied with this justification, writing that “a practicable and less intrusive solution appears to exist.” The ruling suggests that SNCF could use a “generic, inclusive polite phrase” in lieu of a gendered title.
In an opinion from 2024, the court’s advocate general Maciej Szpunar pointed out that SNCF already uses gender-neutral phrases. The company already “uses other, more general, expressions, such as ‘Merci, bon voyage’ or ‘Bonjour’ [‘Thank you, have a good journey’ or ‘Hello’],” the Polish judge wrote.
The case now returns to the Council of State for a final decision.
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