Dutch Regulator Fines Uber $964 Million Over Robot-Fired Drivers

Uber just got hit with one of the biggest privacy fines in European history, and the company let algorithms fire people without human review.

The Dutch data protection authority, the Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens (AP), announced on Monday, August 17, that it's fining Uber 824,990,000 euros, about $964 million, for violating the EU's General Data Protection Regulation. The GDPR bans fully automated decisions that have a major impact on someone's life unless a human being reviews them.

Between 2018 and 2022, according to the AP, Uber's software flagged drivers suspected of fraud, like taking weird detours to pad fares or accepting rides they had no intention of finishing, and automatically suspended their accounts. No human looked at it first. Drivers with persistently low customer ratings could be permanently deactivated the same way, the AP says.

Monique Verdier, the AP's deputy chair, said: "Uber has committed serious infringements. 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."

A machine decided someone's paycheck disappeared, and nobody with a pulse signed off on it.

Uber Says This Is Old News and an Overreaction

Uber isn't rolling over. The company says it will appeal, calling the fine disproportionate.

"The (Data Protection Authority) examined historic policies that were discontinued years ago," Uber said in a statement carried by the Associated Press. "We take decisions that affect drivers' ability to earn extremely seriously and we're fully committed to fair treatment. This includes human reviews, robust safeguards, and the opportunity for drivers to appeal our decisions if they believe we made a mistake."

Uber also disputes a specific factual point. The Guardian reported Uber's argument that only 126 drivers were actually affected by permanent deactivations, a small fraction of its European workforce, and that Uber never automated permanent deactivation decisions in the first place, contradicting the AP's own findings.

Uber's fair point: the conduct here dates back as far as 2018 and ended in 2022, according to the AP's own timeline. This isn't a live practice. If Uber genuinely fixed the problem four years ago, a nearly billion-dollar fine can look like punishing a company for what it used to do, not what it does now.

But the argument has limits. GDPR fines aren't about whether you're still breaking the law today. They're about accountability for the harm already done. And the AP says Uber also failed to adequately tell drivers their accounts were being run through automated fraud and ratings systems at all. That's a separate violation from the deactivations themselves.

How Big Is This Fine, Really?

It's the second-largest GDPR fine ever issued, behind only the 1.2 billion euro ($1.4 billion) penalty Ireland slapped on Meta in 2023 over unlawful data transfers to the U.S., a fine Meta is still appealing.

This is also the fourth time Dutch regulators have fined Uber. The AP hit the company with 600,000 euros in 2018, 10 million euros in 2023, and 290 million euros in 2024 over a separate data-transfer violation. Uber is fighting both the 2023 and 2024 fines, and those cases are still working through appeals.

Under GDPR, fines can run up to 4% of a company's global annual revenue. The AP notes Uber pulled in roughly 44.5 billion euros worldwide in 2025, so 825 million euros represents a real bite.

The case traces back to 171 French drivers who complained to the Ligue des droits de l'Homme, a French human rights group, which then filed with France's privacy regulator, CNIL. Because Uber's European headquarters sits in the Netherlands, the AP took the lead under the EU's one-stop-shop mechanism, coordinating with French regulators along the way.

The Bigger Pattern

The EU fined Google 890 million euros last month over anti-competitive practices, and Google, Apple, Amazon and Meta all face their own stacks of pending EU penalties. A U.S. State Department official said in April these fines have become the "biggest single source of friction" in U.S.-EU economic relations, and Donald Trump has publicly criticized the pattern of Brussels targeting American tech giants.

Is Europe enforcing real privacy protections, or using GDPR as an economic weapon against U.S. companies that dominate markets European firms can't compete in? Both things can be true at once, and neither cancels out the actual finding here: Uber let software make life-altering calls with zero human oversight.

Meanwhile, Uber's actual business is racing forward. The company just pledged more than $10 billion toward autonomous vehicle partnerships, aiming to run robotaxi services in at least 15 cities by the end of 2026, according to the Epoch Times. The company that's being fined for letting algorithms manage humans is now betting billions on algorithms replacing the humans entirely.

Uber's appeal will play out in Dutch courts, likely for years, following the same slow track as its 2023 and 2024 fines. Until then, the $964 million penalty stands on the books