Uber faces fine of nearly $1B over automated driver suspensions
The Dutch Data Protection Authority is fining Uber €825 million (around $966 million) — the second largest penalty issued so far under Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation, according to Reuters.
The Dutch regulator was investigating complaints that Uber had deactivated driver accounts through an automated process without sufficient warning or human oversight. In a statement, deputy chair Monique Verdier said that the company had “committed serious infringements.”
“A computer should not make decisions on its own that have [such] major consequences,” Verdier said.
Uber, however, argued that most driver suspensions are brief, that no permanent deactivations take place without human review, and that drivers have the ability to appeal. (Dutch regulators said some drivers were permanently deactivated without human review, which Uber disputes.) The company said it will appeal the decision.
“We strongly disagree with this decision and disproportionate fine,” an Uber spokesperson told Reuters. TechCrunch has reached out to the company for additional comment.
Brahim Ben Ali, a former Uber driver in France, told the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant that after his account was deactivated in 2019, he collected testimonies from 170 other Uber drivers and eventually brought his complaint to the Netherlands, where Uber’s European headquarters are located.
Ben Ali was assisted in this effort by a Swiss nonprofit focused on digital rights called PersonalData.io, which helped the drivers collect data about how the deactivation decisions were made. Founder Paul-Olivier Dehaye said a driver “can complete a thousand journeys with satisfied passengers, but if just one person reports a very serious problem, the consequences can be enormous.”
Dehaye told me that this is the third fine that the Dutch regulator has levied on Uber, following a €290 million fine over its handling of drivers’ personal data and a €10 million fine stemming from related issues. He also said he plans to start a class action suit through which drivers can seek compensation.
In fact, Dehaye said these fines all originate with complaints made by the same group of drivers. And he’s starting a new company called StartClaims to support the litigation and other regulatory action — first against Uber and then eventually expanding to other gig economy cases, as well as related areas like adtech.
While discussing the case with Dehaye (who I’ve known casually since college), I brought up a blog post by Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, in which Gruber worried that this fine makes it “unlawful in the EU for Uber to monitor its drivers for pulling scams against customers, or just never picking riders up, leaving them stranded.”
Gruber also took issue with Verdier’s statement, arguing, “Saying that ‘a computer’ made these decisions is like saying that when a company suspends or fires a habitually late employee, that ‘the time clock’ made the decision. Managers at the company set the policies, and the devices measure employee compliance.”
Dehaye countered that Gruber “misses the point.”
“Uber is free to use humans to punish drivers who scam, but then [it] has to take responsibility for this decision making (like ‘being an employer’, not ‘being a marketplace’),” he said.
TechCrunch Mobility: The custom chip driving Waymo’s robotaxi ambitions
Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. To get this in your inbox, sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility!
Waymo gets a lot of attention for its fast-paced expansion. And for good reason; it seems like every week, the company’s robotaxis are arriving in a new city, or expanding within an existing service area.
We’ve known for a while that Waymo’s sixth-generation self-driving system — which debuted in its next-generation Ojai robotaxi — is central to those ambitions. But now we have a better understanding about why.
The company, which just opened its Ojai robotaxi to all riders in Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Francisco, has repeatedly said that this next-gen vehicle is cheaper to build, operate, and maintain — ingredients required if the company has any hopes of someday turning a profit.
What was less clear, until this week, was just how hands-on and vertically integrated Waymo has become as it chases that goal.
The company shared this week that it built a custom silicon chip — specifically a 5 nm ASIC chip, which is designed to handle the massive influx of raw data before it reaches the core “brain” of the self-driving system. (To get a sense of how much data, consider that the Waymo Ojai has 13 high-fidelity cameras.) Waymo said the chip delivers more than 1,000 TOPS (trillions of operations per second) of computing performance, a statistic that puts it roughly in the same performance range as Nvidia’s latest DRIVE AGX Thor automotive processor, a powerful computer designed for automated driving applications.
The end result, Waymo says, is a system that has “unmatched efficiency and performance.” The upshot: Waymo contends that this chip is a critical piece of a system that can react fast and safely in complex, high-density environments — like cities.
It’s worth noting that Waymo isn’t working alone on compute. The company listed a slew of partners, some for the first time, that includes AMD, Micron, Nvidia, Samsung, Sandisk, Socionext, and TSMC.
A little bird
A couple of little birds spoke to Sean O’Kane (senior reporter, special projects at TechCrunch) about a rather curious investigation being conducted by the Idaho National Laboratory.
According to our sources, the lab is evaluating whether Chinese lidar sensors might pose a security risk if they become widely used on vehicles in the United States. That is notable on its own. But what got our attention is that the research is being funded by a company — or a group of companies — in the electric and autonomous vehicle industries.
O’Kane reached out to numerous companies, including Rivian, General Motors, Ford, Kodiak, Lucid Motors, Nuro, and Uber. And all of these companies said they were unaware of the review. Aurora, Nvidia, and Zoox didn’t respond to questions.
Deals!
Also, the startup incubated within Rivian, has raised another $150 million in a Series D round led by Prysm Capital with participation from existing backers Eclipse, Greenoaks, and MVP Ventures. Also has raised $455 million since it spun out of Rivian in March 2025.
The raise is notable, and not just because Also has already reached a Series D round after launching just a little more than a year ago. The company’s mission has also evolved, which helps explain why it still needs to keep raising cash.
When Also launched in spring 2025, it was described as a micromobility company focused on pedal-assist electric bikes and commercial cargo quads. Now it is a “Palo Alto-based technology company building the world’s most capable driven and autonomous small electric vehicles.”
That autonomous driving component popped up earlier this year when Also closed a $200 million round and announced a multiyear commercial agreement with DoorDash to develop and deploy autonomous delivery vehicles.
Sidewalk delivery robot company Serve Robotics also had a notable and very timely deal this week. You might recall that earlier this month, Serve reported during its earning call that Uber had reduced its use of its robots on the app; that partnership is set to end next year. Separately, Uber also sold all of its shares in the company.
Months before these changes, Serve was working on several other deals that were recently finalized, according to insiders. Serve has partnered with Grubhub to use its sidewalk robots, starting in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Alexandria, Virginia. Serve also announced that its existing partnership with DoorDash has expanded to San Jose, California, and Washington, D.C.
Uber’s retreat from Serve illustrates an important lesson for any company attempting to scale: Always diversify. And it seems Serve has managed to do that.
Other deals that got my attention …
Einride, the Swedish electric and autonomous trucking company, struck a deal with Tesla to buy 500 of its electricSemis and make the electric big rigs available to its customers, which include Amazon. The Tesla Semis will be added in phases to Einride’s fleet over the next 24 months, starting in September. Reminder: Tesla is trying to scale up but recently pulled back on promises to reach “volume production” in 2026.
Grounded, the Detroit-based startup that customizes electric and gas-powered vans, raised a $5 million seed round, with repeat investments from existing backers Also Capital and Chicago-based early-stage firm The 81 Collection, along with Animal Capital, the Michigan Outdoor Innovation Fund, and “various SpaceX alumni,” according to founder and CEO Sam Shapiro.
Uber said it is investing in, and partnering with, drone delivery company Zipline. Uber and Zipline didn’t disclose the investment amount but did share one lofty goal: to make 1 million deliveries per day using the startup’s drones by the end of 2029.
Vessev, a New Zealand startup developing electric hydrofoil boats, raised $19 million in a Series A round led by Blackbird Ventures. New investors GD1 and Rypples joined alongside existing investors K1W1, Icehouse Ventures, Shasta Ventures, NZVC, and existing angel investors.
Notable reads and other tidbits
Amazon wants its drone delivery service to reach nearly 500 U.S. cities by the end of 2026, expanding its current footprint sixfold.
Bedrock Robotics, an autonomous vehicle technology startup founded by veterans of Waymo and Segment, says excavators equipped with its self-driving system are now operating fully autonomously at three large customer sites in Nevada and Texas.
Hyundai’s luxury car brand Genesis unveiled a seven-seater electric SUV called the GV90 that will compete with other hefty EVs like the Cadillac Escalade IQ and Rivian R1S.
Tesla is one of 11 carmakers in China recalling millions of vehicles over its hidden emergency door releases, which can trap occupants in the event of a crash or a fire. Xiaomi, Xpeng, and Geely brands Zeekr and Lynk & Co. are also recalling EVs.
Tesla, Uber, and Waymo all received permits from Nevada regulators that will allow them to operate commercial robotaxi services in Clark County, home to Las Vegas. Together, these permits would deploy up to 8,000 robotaxis across the county over the next 12 months. It’s unlikely that all 8,000 of these vehicles will land in Vegas over the next year, but even a fraction of that amount will affect the city.
Uber was fined €825 million ($966 million) by the Dutch Data Protection Authority for using automated systems to deactivate or suspend driver accounts without adequately informing them — a violation of European data protection law.
Uber also had a slew of other autonomous vehicle-related announcements this week, including early rider testing in London with partner Wayve; the launch of a robotaxi service in Zagreb, Croatia, with Pony.ai and Verne; and driverless rides in Dubai with Baidu.
Waymo has responded to questions from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration as part of the regulator’s investigation into a crash in which a robotaxi struck a child at low speed. The catch: The responses (at least the ones that have been released so far) are all redacted.
Flock CEO calls for ‘compromise’ as surveillance company faces growing backlash
The country needs to find a “compromise” between privacy and safety, according to Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley.
“When people talk about just one of these, privacy or safety, they’re prioritizing the wrong thing, and what we have to prioritize as a country is compromise,” Langley said during a recent interview with Fox News. “How do we have our safety, and how do we balance privacy?”
Langley’s Fox News appearance was just the latest interview he’s given as the company faces a growing public outcry around concerns that Flock’s surveillance cameras, drones, and license plate recognition technology could be misused.
These concerns aren’t just hypothetical. The Washington Post recently identified 46 cases where police officers have been accused of using Flock technology for unauthorized purposes, including to stalk their wives, girlfriends, or exes.
After listening to an interview with one of the alleged victims, Langley told CBS News, “I apologize. It kills me that she went through that.” At the same time, he insisted, “I don’t think that Flock created police abuse. I think we’re the first company to ever shine a light on it and build the tools to find it.”
Just as the data center backlash has become a potent issue on both the left and the right, both Democratic and Republican politicians have begun to take aim at Flock.
On the left, Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed recently accused his opponent Mike Rogers of supporting “this mass proliferation of Flock cameras, any and everywhere, watching your every move to collect information without you even noticing.” And Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders posted, “STOP AI MASS SURVEILLANCE. STOP FLOCK.”
On the right, three House Republicans recently introduced a bill that would prohibit the federal government from purchasing automated surveillance systems that use facial recognition, biometric IDs, or license plate recognition, “including a Flock Safety camera.”
Flock has already made some changes in response to the criticism, reducing the default data retention time from 30 days to seven days and requiring that a case code be entered before accessing data. But both of these changes can be overridden — for example, police can save data for a longer time period by using a setting called Evidence Mode.
In its response to Flock’s announced changes, the American CIvil Liberties Union said, “While Flock has not shortened the default retention period to the ACLU’s recommended 48 hours, its proposal may be a step in the right direction. Whether this is a real change or just another Flock PR move, however, will depend on how its ‘Evidence Mode’ operates.”
For his part, Langley has said that state regulators should “pass bills that make [the illegal use of Flock data] a criminal offense.” And during his Fox News interview, he pointed to the changes the company has already made, while also saying, “Today, it is too often that in Flock and in other technologies, there’s no regulation. There’s no accountability, and we think that’s wrong.”
TechCrunch will also be asking Langley about these issues when he appears on-stage at our Disrupt conference in October.
Will the DOJ’s investigation into a16z spook other VCs?
Following a Bloomberg report that the Department of Justice is investigating venture firm Andreessen Horowitz for holding board seats with rival AI companies, VCs told TechCrunch that they were baffled.
On the latest episode of the Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I were similarly puzzled by the news. Yes, VC conflicts-of-interest are worth taking seriously, but as Kirsten wondered, “Of all the things that the DOJ would focus on in terms of level of importance, why does this one rise to the top?”
The news was also surprising because of a16z’s ties with the Trump administration, and because the firm has been so quiet about the investigation. It’s a real contrast with the firm’s activity during the Biden years, when — as Sean put it — “every little policy change, especially related to crypto, generated a day’s worth of posting.”
But Sean also speculated that by targeting a16z, the DOJ might also be setting an “example” that “smaller firms would follow.”
Keep reading for a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.
Kirsten Korosec: I think that you bring some interesting perspective to this, Anthony, because you actually worked at a VC firm, whereas Sean and I have never been inside the confines of the VC world. We’ve only reported on it.
Anthony Ha: Long-time equity listeners will know that I did spend a couple years working at an early stage VC firm — a much smaller firm than Andreessen Horowitz, as different as you can be while still technically being in the same industry.
It did color my response when I was reading this article, which is essentially about these board seats that Andreessen Horowitz holds, and the idea that they have board seats in some companies that have become competitors.
It was really surprising to me, as apparently it was to a number of other VCs. And again, I’m not a lawyer, I was not on the legal team of this VC firm. There is, obviously, an understanding, and apparently laws, around the idea that you should not be on boards of competing startups. But this is not something that is, generally, enforced very closely.
Founders don’t feel great if you are on the board of their biggest competitor. But also, startups evolve. And I think that was true in this case — you invest in a startup doing one thing, and then, say, the AI boom happens, and suddenly they’re doing something completely different. So the idea that you would have a year-long DOJ investigation into this — we don’t really know what the results are, there’s a lot of questions about this, but it just seems very strange.
Kirsten: In this case, Ben Horowitz sits on the Databricks board. Partner Martin Casado sits on Fivetran board. And to your point, especially in this AI-driven boom cycle, a lot of companies are changing what they’re doing, and either to jump into the AI space or to take advantage of specific subcategories within it. And a company the size of Andreessen, which makes so many investments and is on a lot of board seats, you can see how this would happen.
To me, what was interesting — and Sean, I wonder if you have an opinion on this — is of all the things that the DOJ would focus on in terms of level of importance, why does this one rise to the top?
Sean O’Kane: I’m just excited we’ve got another chance for disruption here. I mean, we could create a startup that is just going to put an AI on your board, and there are no conflicts of interest. Let’s do it.
No, you’re right. It’s weird for a number of reasons, and when I first saw the headline, it certainly piqued my interest because I wanted to know what it was that they were looking at.
We should back up just a real quick second. Bloomberg reported that this [investigation] has been going on for nearly a year, so this started under the Trump administration. The people who run Andreessen Horowitz are very friendly with the Trump administration, involved in the Trump administration in some ways, sitting on some councils and things like that.
And so, for as much rhetoric as the [second] Trump administration was putting out there when it was still incoming, about being antitrust forward and fighting against the big forces of consolidation or whatever, that really hasn’t borne out. I mean, they settled with Live Nation. They didn’t break up Ticketmaster. We could spend all day talking about how that was a pretty hollow promise.
The Justice Department should not be a tool for the president to just direct at enemies or friends or whoever. But it’s just interesting that this is a bridge they were willing to cross, knowing how close they are with this administration.
And I’ve reported on some things that Andreessen Horowitz have done that made me wonder if that was going to be part of this. Two years ago, we published a story about how Ben Horowitz was personally making connections between the startups that Andreessen Horowitz backs and [the] local police department in Las Vegas, and things that have maybe more of an anti-competitive flavor to it than this — which, like you’ve said, is maybe a bit more by chance because of the way that these companies evolved and wound up competing against each other.
[It] certainly doesn’t seem like it’s something that Andreessen Horowitz feels [is] such an overreach that we have seen them complaining about it on Twitter, like they were during the Biden era — where every little policy change, especially related to crypto, generated a day’s worth of posting. We haven’t really seen that here. So maybe it’s all going to be copacetic in the end.
Anthony: To Sean’s point about the DOJ, without getting too deeply into the politics of it, I think anyone who’s been reading the news knows there’s a lot of turmoil there. There’s a lot of questions about sort of how politicized the office has or hasn’t become. Which, again, just makes it very surprising and strange that there has been this long investigation into an ostensible ally of the Trump administration.
The last thing I wanted to say for now is also just the length of the investigation is very surprising. If it was just about, “Well, we don’t think you should be on these two board seats,” there’s not that much to investigate there. You [would] just tell them, “Don’t do that,” or, “Here’s what we need you to do instead.” [Yes, I may be a little naive about how DOJ investigations work.]
So, what that suggests [is that] there must be a lot that we don’t know. There has to be some other, more serious allegation of something going on. Otherwise, what is there to investigate for that long?
Kirsten: Well, I think that you can have two truths. Meaning, you can have a slow, arduous process because of an inefficient DOJ, and also, you can have some sort of smoking gun or bigger issue. We don’t want to get too speculative and make assumptions. But I do think that their reaction and how quiet they’ve been — perhaps they’re listening to their lawyers, perhaps that there is something a little bit bigger here.
My question is: How does this now affect other VC firms? Are they taking notice, or is this considered a weird outlier, and they’re just going to proceed as normal and continue to take board seats and not worry too much about potential competition between boards down the line?
Sean: I think that’s a good question. If this is really something that is such a concern inside the antitrust division of the DOJ, then maybe this is a way for them to … how do I best put it? Set the example that then those smaller firms would follow. Instead of, if you perceive this as [an] antitrust violation, going after all these other, smaller firms for doing something like this, you go after Andreessen Horowitz and you set the example. And then maybe that puts these other people in more of a wary, cautious position, and so I could see that being the case.
The other thing to think about here is, this administration and the agencies that work for it and next to it have really backed off on public company prosecution in very explicit ways. The SEC and the DOJ have both said that public company investigations and things like that are just not a priority. They would rather go after individuals. Obviously, we’re talking about Andreessen Horowitz as a company here, but it just makes me wonder if this is, in some ways, some sort of side effect of how the priorities have shifted. If you’re not going after corporate prosecutions — you’re backing off on guilty pleas that Boeing has entered, and again, settling with Live Nation and really backing off some of those Fortune 500-type companies — maybe one of the side effects is, you wind up paying a bit more attention to stuff like this.
