Uber Driver Deactivations
Driver accounts closed by software, with no person looking first
What They Said
The two regulator pages behind this exhibit do not record what Uber told drivers or officials while the system ran, so this section sticks to what they do record. Uber used software to track drivers’ behavior and customer reviews. When the software detected a suspicion of fraud, or reviews that were too low, the driver’s account was deactivated.
Uber’s position today is the appeal. It has appealed the fine, and the European Data Protection Board’s October 2026 summary says there is no final judicial decision yet. Everything below is a regulator’s finding, not a court’s. Uber is also defending itself against two earlier fines from the same regulator, from 2023 and 2024.
What Actually Happened
Between 2018 and 2022, Uber’s software decided whether some drivers could keep working. A suspicion of fraud, or customer reviews that were too low, led to an automatic temporary deactivation. Persistent low reviews led to a permanent one. While an account was off, the driver earned nothing through Uber. The Dutch data protection authority, the Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens (AP), found that no human assessed these decisions.
The case began with 171 French drivers, who reported to the Ligue des droits de l’Homme (LDH), a French human rights organization. LDH complained to the French privacy regulator, the CNIL, on their behalf. Uber’s European headquarters are in the Netherlands, so the AP took the case under the GDPR’s one-stop-shop procedure, worked closely with the CNIL, and aligned its fine decision with other European regulators.
On 21 August 2026 the AP announced a fine of €824,990,000. It made two findings. Uber broke the GDPR’s ban on fully automated decision-making, and Uber did not give drivers enough information about the automated decisions. The AP says Uber has now stopped the violations. European regulators cap this kind of fine at 4% of worldwide annual turnover, and the AP puts Uber’s 2025 turnover at around €44.5 billion. By our arithmetic, the fine is about 1.9% of that. It is the AP’s fourth fine on Uber, after €600,000 in 2018, €10 million in 2023 and €290 million in 2024.
The AP’s deputy chair, Monique Verdier, put the finding this way: “Drivers were deactivated without pardon. From one moment to the next, they no longer had any income through Uber. That’s forbidden. A computer should not make decisions on its own that have major consequences for you. These decisions should have been looked at first by a human being.”
The Root Cause
A detection signal was wired straight to a penalty, with no person in between. The software noticed something, and the account closed. The step the regulator says was missing is small and specific: someone looking at the case before the income stopped.
Read that narrowly. The pages we used do not say how many accounts were closed, or whether any closure was a mistake, so this exhibit does not claim any were. The finding is about the missing look, and the fine is aimed at that.
The second failure was communication. The AP found that Uber did not sufficiently inform drivers about the automated decision-making. The pages do not say what drivers were told in practice. The finding is only that it was not enough.
The Pattern to Watch For
Any rule that can end someone’s account, pay or access without a person reviewing it first fits this pattern. Fraud flags, review scores and risk thresholds all qualify. This ruling applies the GDPR, so if the drivers, sellers, contractors or customers affected are in the EU, it is your law. Outside the EU, I would still ask the question. I do not know how a regulator in the US would see it.
What You Should Steal
Make a list of every place where software in your business can end someone’s access, pay or account. Next to each one, write the name of the person who looks at the case before the decision takes effect, and keep a record that they did. If the honest answer is “nobody,” that is where to start. Then tell the people affected, in plain words, that the decision is automated and what triggers it. The AP’s second finding was about exactly that. Check the appeal status before you quote the fine anywhere.