On the 20. January 2020, the International Correspondence Chess Federation (ICCF) has released a new "ICCF Privacy Notice", following decisions made at the 2019 ICCF Congress in Vilnius:
- ICCF no longer records or stores your date of birth;
- ICCF no longer records or stores your gender;
- Information relating to the date of birth or gender has now been removed from our database;
- Sensitive information collected during investigations (for example information about your health, etc.) is now destroyed six months after we have processed it.
In the "Introduction" to the full statement, the data protection law has been referred to as a justification:
"The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a regulation in European law which states that we are only able to process your personal information if we have valid reasons to do so."
Below, I shall quote the full text of the chapter "Gender":
"GENDERWe no longer store information about your gender. It is possible for visitors to our website to deduce your gender if you have participated in historical gender specific tournaments.ICCF have historically awarded gender specific titles (such as Lady International Master and Lady Grand Master), it is possible for visitors to our website to deduce your gender from these titles. ICCF will replace ladies titles with their gender neutral equivalent on request."
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Now, however, serious logical obstacles are arising.
First of all, it seems that the data protection law should be applied to all kinds of chess (the OTB tournaments included) and, actually, to all kinds of sports.
But this is senseless, because sports events are public events, and the sportsman's age and gender are obviously relevant information. Actually, a philosophical question arises about why the state (country) and the sportsman's name will not be classified as well!
Some are arguing that all this is because of the rights and the principle of equality.
Unfortunately, such rights should be protected using corresponding laws, not using the data protection law. But if the data protection law has been made to protect women's rights, then the European Union has probably shot dead all its professors. Anyway, to protect women's rights in chess, using the data protection law seems highly artificial manoeuver.
Concerning the rights, it seems that it has never been prohibited for women to participate in the general chess tournaments. Quite to the contrary, men have been prohibited from participating in the ladies tournaments. The ladies tournaments have been the implementation of women's rights, not the violation of it.
Converting ladies' titles to their "gender-neutral equivalent" is also dubious. It is a statistical inference from the sub-class to the whole class. But the idea of sport is to find out in the real battle, who is the winner, not to make statistical hypotheses about it.
For example, Island's chess champion cannot be converted to the champion of the world.
Any such conversion will itself be a target for accusations concerning injustice. At best, such conversions can be "provisional".
To my mind, what we are witnessing is the Orwellian overwriting of the sport's history and even the deletion of it, following some obscure egalitarian ideology.
While they are talking about the "protection of sensitive personal data", the real effect of such laws and such implementation of those laws is to make it more difficult, if not impossible, to conduct scientific, statistical investigations about the correlations between the sex, nation, age, etc, and the sports results. However, this is by no means the implementation of equal rights, it is something else, a completely different thing.
