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Dutch regulator fines Uber $966M for automating driver suspensions
- formerly_proven 24d ago*Netherlands raises $1bn in special taxes from overseas operation.
- andsoitis 24d agoUber is breaking Dutch law.
- anon48293 24d agoNo, it’s a fine because they broke the law. The EU fortunately takes that seriously.
- vrganj 24d agoI'm so tired of this talking point. Either follow our laws or get the fuck out of our market. There's no special right for American companies to ignore our rules and when they get fined for breaking them, that's just rule of law. Maybe there's been enough regulatory capture that big corps can ignore laws on the other side of the pond, but for now, we are still a society of law and justice.
- tchalla 24d agoAnd it’s also incredibly tiring to force legal paradigms of one country over another. Don’t like it? Don’t operate. Please don’t operate and whine how the country is not bending over backwards to your demands.
- anigbrowl 24d agoThe internet has enabled a sort of structural/emergent legal colonialism - not centrally planned or directed, but as an emergent property of a global information system and those most economically incentivized to profit off it. The most immediately unpleasant example of this is nuisance streamers who deliberately antagonize people in foreign jurisdictions while leaning on the norms and protections of their own home turf.
- ReptileMan 24d agoReading the Guardian article - it feels that the decision is weakly motivated. It is not clear exactly what rules Uber broke. >“Uber has committed serious infringements” by deactivating driver accounts without warning or human involvement, the organization’s deputy chair Monique Verdier said in a statement. >“From one moment to the next they no longer had any income … A computer should not make decisions on its own that have (such) major consequences.” If you manage to extract usable info from that quote kudos. To me it looks like regulator going berserk in reading the unholy mess that is GDPR.
- andsoitis 24d agoGDPR rules ban decisions made solely by computer algorithms when they have a significant impact on people’s lives, such as on employment. Such decisions require meaningful human review and a way to challenge a decision.
- ReptileMan 24d agoBut the drivers are not Uber employees. Which is the whole point of uber existing. It is a shitty model from Uber's side - but in this case just attack the model. Outlaw gig economy and be done with it. There are enough protections in employment laws in EU.
- roughly 24d ago“Such as” employment. Given this kind of ambiguity, it seems like we need some kind of, like, procedure by which it’s decided whether Uber violated the law as written, and if so, what the consequences should be - maybe the sort of thing where we’d get experts in the law together in a room to investigate and debate the merits of each side’s argument and determine which stands up to scrutiny or not. Maybe we could have third disinterested legal expert hear both sides and make a decision. That’s really the only way to clear this whole thing up, I think.
- SoftTalker 24d agoGDPR is not limited to employment matters.
- frisco 24d agoSorry how else are they supposed to do it at Uber scale?
- tchalla 24d agoAre you saying that we should allow a Uber to do whatever they want because of scale they are operating? It’s Uber choice to operate at scale. No one forced them to.
- frisco 24d agoThis is pure revenue extraction from American tech. The EU now makes more in fines from American companies than it does in taxes from its own tech industry. It is clearly impossible to fill these roles with humans without breaking the economic case for Uber, which is obviously the goal. Europe is so fucked man.
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- DarmokTanagra 24d agoAmerican tech companies just have a hard time operating in a legal system that isn’t bought and paid for.
- GauntletWizard 24d agoThen Uber is fucked. "This is how you do it cheaper" isn't an escape hatch, and we shouldn't accept terrible behavior just because it's cheaper. Disclaimer: I briefly worked for Uber and quit in disgust
- yorwba 24d agoIf it's clearly impossible, how come Uber managed to become compliant in 2022?
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- SpicyLemonZest 24d agoWe’ve gotta normalize linking to the underlying ruling. Uber says they didn’t automate any permanent suspensions and the regulator says they did; how can anyone interpret this story without more information on how the regulator determined this?
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- tchalla 24d ago> GDPR rules ban decisions made solely by computer algorithms when they have a significant impact on people’s lives, such as on employment, saying such decisions require meaningful human review and a way to challenge a decision. The law Uber broke. I can’t believe they found it that difficult to follow something as simple as that.
- JumpCrisscross 24d ago> something as simple as that Dutch Uber drivers aren’t employees [1]. [1] https://nltimes.nl/2026/01/27/uber-drivers-freelancers-employees-amsterdam-court-appeal-rules https://nltimes.nl/2026/01/27/uber-drivers-freelancers-emplo...
- molf 24d agoThat's irrelevant. The data subject shall have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her. Nowhere in article 22 [1] does it restrict the scope to employees. If Uber processes data, and makes decisions based on that data in a purely automated way that significantly affects people, it is not allowed. That's all there is to it. [1]: https://gdpr-info.eu/art-22-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/art-22-gdpr/
- JumpCrisscross 24d agoThis is a better citation than the original one.
- tecleandor 24d ago> The case against Uber concerns European incidents from 2018 to 2022, stemming initially from a French complaint. It was handled by the Dutch regulator because Uber’s European headquarters are in the Netherlands.
- roughly 24d agoThey didn’t find it difficult, they found it expensive and figured they could avoid it. In the US, they’d probably have been right; in the EU, apparently not.
- loeg 24d agoThis is likely more than Uber's entire Netherlands annual revenue, I think.
- this_was_posted 24d agoThis fine is for the entire EU, the complaint was filed in France but handled by the Dutch because Ubers european headquarters is located in the Netherlands.
- amazingamazing 24d agoI am curious, if the algorithm provided the recommendation and a person had to say agree or disagree for each would that be against the law? Uber may want to reconsider operating in the Netherlands- would be surprised if they get this much in profit from this region. Unfortunately for them these laws are EU wide.
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- SoftTalker 24d agoIf the person was just rubber-stamping the computer decision, then likely yes it would still be against the law. They would likely need to demonstrate that each case was evaluated and considered by a person with proper knowledge and/or training to make such a decision.
- formerly_proven 24d agoIf rubber-stamping decisions by a supervising person is a breach of this GDPR rule, then the judiciary should be very thankful that the legislative excluded it from GDPR's scope :D
- SoftTalker 24d agoLikely true, but I was speaking specifically about rubber-stamping an automated computer decision. The law seems to require human judgment to be applied, and just passing a computer decision unchallenged doesn't seem to do that. But I don't live in Europe, so maybe I'm giving it too much credit.
- sajithdilshan 24d ago> Uber temporarily suspended accounts of some drivers who were suspected of fraud, including when its systems concluded drivers had taken unnecessary detours to inflate fares or accepted trips without intending to complete them Regardless of how Uber did it, these kind of drivers should be removed from the platform. This happened to me more than once. It’s quite frustrating as an example you want to get to airport and a driver has accepted your request, but you can see in the app the vehicle doesn’t move. One time this happened for all requests on Uber when I wanted to go to airport early morning and had to switch to Bolt
- molf 24d agoI agree. But wouldn't you want a human to be involved in this process? Let's say you run a legitimate SaaS company, and a cloud provider suspends your account due to an allegation of fraud. Wouldn't you prefer a human is involved? To me that seems pretty reasonable when people's livelihood is at stake.
- gmadsen 24d agoDepends how pervasive the issue. I agree a human in the loop for reasonable redress is appropriate
- sajithdilshan 24d agoI don’t think Uber or any other platform would automatically suspend the account based on one incident. It would have been multiple people complaining about a driver and then got suspended. Drivers should be able to appeal and in that case a human should manually review before making the suspension permanent. Most probably that’s how it happens right now, but article doesn’t say anything about how the appeals are processed.
- Aurornis 24d ago> But wouldn't you want a human to be involved in this process? The article says human review was used for the final decisions. The accounts were temporarily suspended during the investigation. Investigations take time because you need to allow time for the person to respond with their side of the story and then to have human reviewers investigate, which can take multiple rounds. Having human review is as simple as having one person watch a dashboard of accounts flagged for fraud and then press the suspend-account button after skimming it. I fully expect that’s what they switched to after getting hit with this. > To me that seems pretty reasonable when people's livelihood is at stake. What about the riders who are on the receiving end of fraudulent drivers in the best case, abusive or dangerous drivers in the worst case? It is possible to go to far in trying to protect workers for things that impact paying customers. Thinking of it only as big bad companies versus innocent workers misses the real problems.
- molf 24d agoSo according to the regulator Uber automatically suspended driver accounts that were flagged in decision of fraud or due to low ratings. They also failed to inform drivers about the automated decision making. Here is the statement from the Dutch data protection authority: Uber made fully automated decisions regarding drivers. In cases of suspected fraud or excessively low customer ratings, driver accounts were automatically temporarily deactivated or, in the case of persistently low ratings, permanently deactivated. As a result, their income from Uber ceased during the deactivation period. Uber thereby violated the ban on fully automated decision-making under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The AP also found that Uber failed to adequately inform drivers about the automated decision-making. Uber has since ceased the violations. Reference to the law that was broken (GDPR): [2][3] Article 22.1: The data subject shall have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her. Article 13.2f: In addition to the information referred to in paragraph 1, the controller shall, at the time when personal data are obtained, provide the data subject with the following further information necessary to ensure fair and transparent processing: [...] the existence of automated decision-making, including profiling, referred to in Article 22(1) and (4) and, at least in those cases, meaningful information about the logic involved, as well as the significance and the envisaged consequences of such processing for the data subject. [1]: https://www.autoriteitpersoonsgegevens.nl/actueel/uber-krijgt-boete-van-bijna-825-miljoen-euro-voor-geautomatiseerd-blokkeren-van-chauffeurs https://www.autoriteitpersoonsgegevens.nl/actueel/uber-krijg... [2]: https://gdpr-info.eu/art-22-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/art-22-gdpr/
- qnleigh 24d agoSome of you might have read the short story Lena by qntm [0], which is about brain uploading and the effective enslavement of the uploaded once their humanity is hidden behind an API. That story is actually about the gig economy [1]. Of course having a dishonest Uber driver is annoying, but I think that has nothing on getting suspended or fired by an automated system. [1] https://qntm.org/mmacevedo https://qntm.org/mmacevedo [1] https://qntm.org/uploading https://qntm.org/uploading
- qnleigh 24d ago> "Lena" presents a lush, capitalist ideal where you are a business, and all of the humanity of your workforce is abstracted away behind an API. Your people, your "employees" or "contractors" or "partners" or whatever you want to call them, cease to be perceptible to you as human. Your workers have no power whatsoever, and you no longer have to think about giving them pensions, healthcare, parental leave, vacation, weekends, evenings, lunch breaks, bathroom breaks... This is extremely realistic. This is already real. In particular, this is the gig economy. For example, if you consider how Uber works: in practical terms, the Uber drivers work for an algorithm, and the algorithm works for the executives who run Uber. There is a kind of airtight bulkhead separating the human drivers from the humans who control the algorithm. The management layer sends the drivers instructions electronically, impersonally, at immense scale, and the drivers respond using a narrow collection of APIs. This bulkhead is intentionally designed to make it impossible for these two sets of humans to actually talk to one another