In their upcoming new measuring system, the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) will not record the age, gender or size of train station visitors after all. This was announced by the SBB group management at a balance sheet media conference on Monday and in various communications. The project of “spying on customers” had triggered harsh criticism of the Swiss railways.
The state-owned SBB still wants to install more surveillance systems in 57 stations, in addition to the tens of thousands of cameras already in use on trains and stations. They are intended to record the flows of travelers and customers in the numerous shops in the stations with the help of a “Customer Frequency Measurement System 2.0” (KFMS), for which the Swiss consumer protection magazine K-Tipp discovered a procurement plan on a tender platform.
According to the tender documents, the system should originally also be able to record personal characteristics such as gender, size or age. There was also talk in the media of facial recognition/detection using hidden cameras. As K-Tipp wrote, the goal of the KFMS and the data collected with it is even “the highest possible skimming off of shop passers-by using data analysis”.
At first only a partial waiver
After considerable public pressure and objections from politicians, the SBB is now modifying these requested options in the tender plans. In February, after the K-Tipp publication, the railway company announced that it did not want to use facial recognition in the stations and would not collect any data that would allow conclusions to be drawn about individuals. “The tender was formulated in a very technical way and was simply misleading in places. We have to do better in the future,” it said in the in-house news portal.
At the time, however, SBB still wanted to stick to the advertised customer segmentation plan, such as age, gender or size. But now the company management, above all probably SBB boss Vincent Ducrot, has pulled the emergency brake. He now wants to do without the customer categorizations.
It is true that the SBB only procured a system that was fully compliant with data protection. “For me, however, there is not enough benefit for the core rail business,” sage SBB-Chef Vincent Ducrot. He also heard the concerns of politicians and the public and took them seriously: “Trust in SBB is very important to me.”
Public pressure works
The SBB emphasizes that the counting data is not linked to personal data. The aim is “that the travellers, all visitors, feel safe and comfortable in the station and that the right services are in the right place.” SBB will adjust its tender. It will prepare a data protection impact assessment for incoming offers. The railway company writes that SBB will only decide on an offer after it has been checked by the Federal Data Protection Commissioner (FDPIC).
The two civil society organizations AlgorithmWatch CH and Digitale Gesellschaft, together with other organizations, launched an open letter against SBB’s plans, which was signed by over 16,000 people. It called for “abandoning biometric categorization and surveillance.” The Both organizations “welcome the announcement by SBB“, but at the same time emphasize that they want to keep up the pressure and continue to keep a close eye on the SBB to ensure that no monitoring methods are used in the future that are incompatible with fundamental rights.
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