Those were the days: you went to the ticket counter at the station shortly before the train departed, told the railway official where you wanted to go and in which carriage class, paid - usually - in cash and then went to the platform. The official was not interested in who you were and certainly not what telephone number or email address you had. Deutsche Bahn is expected to only sell long-distance tickets if you provide contact details from October 2023. But there is still one last loophole: the machines. The planned regulation will initially only affect so-called saver tickets. Tickets should still be able to be purchased "anonymously" at full price. The plan by Germany's largest railway operator is naturally not very popular with consumer advocates. The question is very clear: Why does DB suddenly want to have the contact details of passengers for cheap tickets, even when they are purchased at the counter? For decades, this was not necessary. The Federal Association of Consumer Organizations fears that completely different interests could be behind the "digitalization compulsion". A spokeswoman told Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg, among others, that the DB's planned regulation, which is expected to come into force in October 2023, would make absolutely no sense when selling tickets at the counter. It has not been possible to buy "anonymous tickets" for long-distance travel on the Internet or via the app for a long time. There is at least the suspicion that the DB could also use the data for advertising purposes, for example for sending "special offers" by email and/or SMS. Consumer advocates are asking themselves "what for?" However, consumer advocates also assume that there are already a lot of problems at the ticket counters alone.