Dutch Regulators Hit Uber With €825 Million GDPR Fine Over Automated Driver Bans

The Dutch Data Protection Authority has handed Uber a €825 million ($964 million) fine for running fully automated account suspensions on drivers, sometimes permanently, with no human in the loop to catch errors. Under GDPR, that's a clear violation. The rules explicitly prohibit consequential decisions made entirely by algorithms, without any meaningful human review.

The authority says the violations ran from 2018 to 2022. On top of the automated decision-making problem, Uber also failed to properly inform drivers that their livelihoods could be terminated by a piece of software. Not a great look.

Uber, predictably, disputes everything. The company says the policies in question were scrapped years ago and that it now operates with human reviews, appeal mechanisms, and what it calls 'robust safeguards.' Whether those safeguards were robust enough during the four years regulators were actually examining is, of course, the entire point.

This is the fourth fine the Dutch authority has levied against Uber. The previous record was a €290 million penalty in 2024 for shipping European drivers' personal data to the US without adequate legal cover. Uber has apparently become a reliable source of revenue for Dutch regulators.

An appeal is coming, which will drag this out for years. That's standard procedure. But nearly a billion euros is a number that tends to focus minds, even at a company Uber's size.