Uber faces fine of nearly $1B over automated driver suspensions

JUST IN: Uber hit with €825m (nearly $1bn) fine by the Dutch Data Protection Authority over automated driver suspensions, the second-largest penalty ever issued under Europe's GDPR.

Uber just got fined eight hundred twenty five million euros for letting a computer fire people.

The Dutch Data Protection Authority says Uber deactivated driver accounts through an automated process, no proper warning, no human looking at the decision. That's nearly a billion dollars, and the second largest GDPR penalty ever handed down. The regulator's deputy chair put it plainly, a computer should not make decisions on its own with consequences this big.

Uber says most suspensions are brief, nobody gets permanently cut without human review, and it's appealing what it calls a disproportionate fine. The regulator says some drivers were permanently deactivated with no human involved at all.

And here's the part I find remarkable. This started with one French driver, kicked off the app in 2019, who collected testimonies from a hundred and seventy others and took the complaint to Amsterdam. It's the third Dutch fine against Uber from that same group, and a class action is coming next. One driver, one billion dollars.

This is Liu Yang, reporting for HIT.