When you travel with FAIRTIQ you also share with us some personal data, such as your location or your name. All the data we collect about you has a purpose. Sharing your location allows us to compute the right ticket for your trip. Sharing your name is a legal requirement for electronic public transport tickets. And sharing your credit card details makes it possible to seamlessly charge the rides to it.

I’m often concerned, when talking about personal data, that the company which collects them makes bad use of it, such as for targeted ads that will just annoy me or – worse – make me buy things I didn't even know I needed. Or they could sell it to other companies. At FAIRTIQ we have a strict policy about personal data – in short, the data is solely used to operate and improve the FAIRTIQ apps. We also anonymise all data after one year.

Another aspect is how well your personal data is protected against unauthorised access by another person. We already have several protections in place. For example the communication from your mobile phone to our servers is encrypted so that no-one can spy on and track your position. We do not store your credit card number – only our payment provider does. Also our servers’ infrastructure is operated by experts with proven track records.

Today, in addition, we're announcing that we have fully encrypted our databases. That brings an additional layer of security to your personal data: if someone manages to get access to the disks where we store the data, they simply couldn't make any sense of it! They would just see series of digits that you only can read if you own the decryption key, which is stored in a different, very secure place. Engineers call this process “encryption at rest”, but I’ll simply say the data can rest in peace!

Beyond GDPR

I myself expect the services I use to take care of my personal data properly, hence it's very important to me that FAIRTIQ does handle yours (and mine!) properly. FAIRTIQ already complies with the EU General Data Protection Regulation GDPR, however we want to push it beyond that and therefore we will continue to bring new measures to protect your privacy even further, such as the one I presented today.