Deutsche Bahn AG

The BigBrotherAward in the “Mobility” category goes to

Deutsche Bahn

Deutsche Bahn (“German railways”, the main German railway company) receives this award because it uses digitalisation to gradually make anonymous travelling completely impossible.

There is hardly another company that has brought such masses of customers up against it as Deutsche Bahn. This is not about delay, closed railway restaurants and similar pardonable shortcomings. It is about digital coercion, about ignoring principles of data protection such as data minimisation – and for many travellers it is about existential matters:

1. The discount card, Bahncard 50 or 25, which from mid-2024 is no longer issued as a card but is only transferred to people’s smartphones. Which is where it has to be presented to the conductor on demand.

2. Saver tickets are no longer sold via machines. For purchase at the ticket office you have to submit your mobile phone number or your email address.

3. The Deutschlandticket (which covers all of Germany’s regional trains and local transports for currently just 49 € a month) is only offered as a digital ticket for your smartphone.

4. In addition, buying tickets from a machine is made more and more difficult: machines are dismantled or adapted to no longer accept cash. Those machines that still accept cash are often decorated with signs saying “out of order”.

Looking at every single measure we might still assume that their consequences were not properly taken into consideration, that it is just digitalisation badly done. But if we take a step back, we recognise a pattern – tile for tile of a surveillance mosaic. Deutsche Bahn seems to be making every effort to render anonymous rail travel impossible.

Let us take a closer look at this:

The first tile of the mosaic: Bahncards 50 and 25

Bahncards 50 and 25 no longer exist as cards. The reason given is that everything is turning digital anyway – it just can’t be helped. You are all being digitalised – resistance is futile. A particularly hypocritical claim from Deutsche Bahn’s PR is that this is going to reduce plastic waste by 30 tons a year and will thus be extremely ecological. We must stop here to take this one apart: no, it is not good for the environment to force passengers to buy a modern smartphone. Using a smartphone is by no means sustainable per se since the production of electronic systems and running computer centres require a lot of resources.

What is more, no plastic is actually needed for a Bahncard: other innovative solutions have been around for a long time. The GLS Bank shows us how to do it: their bank card is largely made of wood. The GLS even advertised this on illuminated panels on the ICE (Intercity Express). And when a card is being ordered the railway company could simply enquire if the customer would like to do without a physical card.

But let’s be honest – the railway company’s objective is not about plastic. It is to make the app compulsory – for the sake of data mining.

The cries of protest from the people which followed the announcement that the Bahncard would only be delivered electronically on their smartphones from mid-2024 must have been heard all the way up on the executive floor. There have been masses of letters of protest, emails and notices of Bahncard cancellations of which Digitalcourage received copies.

We received heartbreaking letters. “I can’t visit my grandchildren so often now as it is too expensive without a Bahncard 50, and I can’t figure out how to use the Bahncard on my smartphone.”

The massive protests caused DB to backpedal a little and now permit a substitute PDF document to be printed out when it is ordered at the ticket office. But this is only a temporary strategy in order to muffle the protests against digital coercion. DB writes this in several answers to Bahncard holders: This is only a temporary solution. You will all be digitalised.

Another tile: Saver and Super-Saver tickets

These bargain tickets, of which there are never enough available, can now no longer be bought from machines because for the past few months travellers have been forced to submit personal data, that is, an email address. Or a mobile phone number. And that is not possible on a machine, only at the ticket office. Or online, of course. Hey presto, your ticket is now personalised! Every purchase, every click is a tile in the mosaic. And that is a problem for all those who do not possess a smartphone. Here, too, DB provides an excuse: the telephone number or by default the email address is allegedly needed to contact travellers in case their train is delayed or leaves early. You must be joking! Meanwhile Alexander Roßnagel, the data protection officer for the state of Hesse, which is in charge of the DB company, made it clear that forced submission of people’s mobile numbers or email addresses is a violation of data protection law.¹

Deutschlandticket

Politicians and associations add tile after tile to the mosaic: Deutschlandticket? Student’s season tickets? Deutsche Bahn will offer either only in “digital coercion” editions. This is based on the Regionalisation Act (Regionalisierungsgesetz): “[The Deutschlandticket] shall be available in digital form.”² My small brain tells me: it says “shall” there, not “must”³. Exclusivity is not mentioned. But the railway company insists on it.

So now on one side of the spectrum, we have people who do not possess a smartphone – or who possess one but find operating technical devices too complicated, who feel under pressure and cancel their Bahncard because they don’t think they can ever use it again. On the other side, diametrically opposed to this, there are technologically experienced people who run an independent operating system on their devices and therefore have no access to Google’s and Apple’s app stores. Because it is only there that you can get the necessary “DB Navigator” app (in contrast to many public transport timetable apps), and the app is strictly required for using the ticket. These people know a lot about data processing – and it is precisely for this reason that they guard their informational self-determination and do not want to leave a slime trail of data everywhere.

The Federal Association of Consumer Advice Centres (Verbraucherzentrale Bundesverband, vzbv) conducted a representative poll⁴ titled “Freedom of Choice in Mobility” to find out people’s opinions about digital tickets and exclusively digital tickets. The results of this survey show that although a large percentage of railway passengers buy their tickets online, 81% still think that it is the responsibility of public transport companies like Deutsche Bahn to allow people without smartphones or internet access to purchase tickets.

Ticket vending machines

The question who travels where and how is obviously of great importance to Deutsche Bahn. The number of ticket machines is systematically reduced or – in areas where Deutsche Bahn is still allowed to serve regional railway lines – they stand unrepaired at dreary, bleak stops. And cash is mostly refused – another case of coercion towards the digital, towards cashless payment via credit or debit card⁵.

And – I almost forgot to mention that unlike the old days they don’t sell tickets on the trains any more.

“DB Navigator”

The next tile in the surveillance mosaic: the DB Navigator app. An app which not only sells tickets and shows timetables, but also surreptitiously spins the digital threads by which we are supervised: trackers.

Deutsche Bahn urges everyone to use the DB Navigator app. It spies on its users though, and passes on a lot of data about them. The hack: Deutsche Bahn declares all trackers it urgently wants to have as “necessary”. According to Deutsche Bahn, it is six companies altogether, including Adobe and Google, whose contribution is necessary for the latest version of the app and to whom data are passed on. The company does not grant their customers the option to disable this. Technically these trackers are not in the least “necessary”.

Two years ago – in 2022 – Digitalcourage sued Deutsche Bahn for these trackers that cannot be disabled. You have probably heard about it. Together with blogger and security expert Mike Kuketz and with our lawyer Peter Hense we have been waiting for a court date for two years now.

We have now laid out several tiles of a mosaic. There are many gaps yet to be filled which would exceed the scope of this laudatory speech. But we can already discern a pattern in the mosaic.

Those whose train happens to actually run have to show their tickets to friendly conductors. These have smartphones which they use to check the tickets. An app is installed on these phones which generates a ticket checking history – by which the route taken by every passenger can be tracked.

The name of this app, by the way, is “mosaic” (Mosaik).

We would like to give this mosaic a pattern of our own: environmentally friendly, data protection friendly. A railway company which takes the needs and well-being of passengers seriously. This sense of “data protection friendly” and “well-being” includes being able to travel by train anonymously and without surveillance.

Why is it so important to be able to move freely and unrecognised in this country? Because we, as the citizens, are first and foremost the sovereign in this state and not mobility shifting mass, suspects or marketing objects. Therefore we want to be able to move freely. By train, among and above other things.

Congratulations, Deutsche Bahn, on the BigBrotherAward 2024!