The Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens fined Uber €824.9 million ($966 million) on August 21, 2026, for letting software — not people — decide when a driver’s income stopped, according to the AP’s published decision and reporting from PPC Land, MediaNama, and SecurityWeek. Between 2018 and 2022, fraud-flagging and rating-threshold systems deactivated accounts, sometimes permanently, with no human review at the point the consequence landed. That is now the second-largest fine issued under GDPR, trailing only Ireland’s €1.2 billion penalty against Meta in 2023.
Bandwidth Blog reports the AP calculated the fine “at the statutory maximum allowed under EU law, derived from 4% of Uber’s worldwide annual turnover.” PPC Land’s own math undercuts that framing: against Uber’s roughly €44.5 billion 2025 global turnover, the 4% ceiling would sit near €1.78 billion — meaning the actual penalty lands closer to 1.85% of turnover, not the cap.
A regulator that wanted to signal maximum severity had headroom to double this fine and didn’t — worth remembering the next time “statutory maximum” gets attached to a number that isn’t one.
The more durable story here is procedural, not arithmetic. Per PPC Land, this is the third Dutch penalty traced back to a single complaint filed by 171 French drivers through the Ligue des droits de l’Homme — a filing that, via the GDPR’s one-stop-shop mechanism, has now generated more than €1.1 billion in nominal Dutch fines against Uber across the 2023, 2024, and 2026 decisions. For any platform operating an EU headquarters under one-stop-shop jurisdiction, that’s the actual exposure model: one national complaint, one lead regulator, compounding penalties over multiple enforcement cycles.
Uber’s appeal, per SecurityWeek and DecisionMarketing, rests on the claim that current systems already include human review and dispute channels — the same defense the company used against the 2024 transfer fine. Appeals of this size are not automatic losses for regulators: a Luxembourg court threw out Amazon’s €746 million 2021 GDPR fine earlier this year, per DecisionMarketing, after it briefly stood as the second-largest penalty on record. Whether Uber’s fine survives judicial review, and whether the AP’s underlying finding — that algorithmic account termination categorically requires human sign-off — gets tested against other gig platforms’ automated systems, is the thing to track next.
The AP noted that the €824.9 million fine was calculated at the statutory maximum allowed under EU law, derived from 4% of Uber's worldwide annual turnover.
