Some profile managers or registration forms in European sites asked me how I want to be addressed, including a menu with Mister, Doctor, PhD etc. American sites usually have at most name, middle name and family name and mails start with Dear Name. English is easy because Dear is OK for all genres. Other languages need a different word for male and female people so their either end up collecting personal information that they wouldn't need for the service they are offering or they have to find some impersonal way to address you.
An example with Italian. Welcome is benvenuto for men and benvenuta for women. Welcome back is either bentornato or bentornata. It's impossible to use them unless we ask for the genre of the customer or use a DB / AI to infer it from the name. We still need a way to let the customer fix any mistake, a mistake which would probably be unwelcome.
So the common workaround is to use words like ciao, which is informal and possibly not well received by older people, or buongiorno which is OK for most of the day but not in the night (good morning vs good evening) or just use the name.
Best solution, if you don't need names to serve your service or because of regulations, don't ask them, use only the email address and make GDPR happier.
One way to address the issue with gendered grammar would be to ask the user to chose between which of ‘benvenuto’ and ‘benvenuta’ should be used when corresponding with them.
That way, you don’t strictly know their gender, you don’t have to ask for it, just what grammar construct they prefer you use.
That's another way to do it but I can see at least a couple of downsides:
1, the easy one: there might be more that one inflected form (gendered) in the UI and it could be tedious for the user to select all of them. Of course by choosing one we can automatically set the others.
2, the substantial one: strictly speaking the users don't tell us about their gender but there are strong hints about what they are, given the statistics of the general population and the name they gave us. I'm not sure how the Privacy Authority of a EU country would look at that but IANAL.
Furthermore we're starting to make our app enter the rabbit hole of non binary gender identities and to handle that we would have spend more time and money for maybe no reason.
I give an example that covers all those points:
Of my current customers one is running a service for which they are mandated to collect personal data. They must know the official gender as in the official ID documents of the country. Anything more than that could be nice but it is not necessary and would be probably unexpected by users, maybe even looked at suspiciously.
Another customer is running a B2B service. They need only a username and the company email of the users. If they want to welcome them with Benvenuto/a, Bienvenido/a, Bienvenu/ue they would have to ask for a bit of personal data that could put them needlessly into the scope of GDPR.
This is something that is easy to do in automation, but much harder to do in personal interaction unless you interact with people regularly. I've seen my name butchered in a hundred different ways and I've learned to simply not care but to respond to the message rather than the mode of address. And obviously I try to get it right whenever I address something. It's akin to the Robustness Principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle .
An example with Italian. Welcome is benvenuto for men and benvenuta for women. Welcome back is either bentornato or bentornata. It's impossible to use them unless we ask for the genre of the customer or use a DB / AI to infer it from the name. We still need a way to let the customer fix any mistake, a mistake which would probably be unwelcome.
So the common workaround is to use words like ciao, which is informal and possibly not well received by older people, or buongiorno which is OK for most of the day but not in the night (good morning vs good evening) or just use the name.
Best solution, if you don't need names to serve your service or because of regulations, don't ask them, use only the email address and make GDPR happier.