After bans of drivers, a complaint against Uber before the Cnil – SOPA Images / SIPA
The League of Human Rights (LDH), filed a complaint against Uber Thursday with the National Commission for Computing and Freedoms (Cnil). The association was mandated by 171 VTC drivers who were banned from the application after “sending automatic and strictly identical messages, all based on the same model”, it is written in the complaint.
The reasons given by the American firm to justify these disconnections are in most cases a “violation of one of the principles of the Uber community charter” or else an “anomaly”, without further clarification. For complainants, this standardized sanctioning process is fully automated and without human intervention, which is illegal. Especially since in the vast majority of cases, there is no recourse to contest these sanctions.
Definitely disconnected without any warning
In a survey of 813 VTC drivers, the INV union established that more than half of them had been victims of a permanent or temporary disconnection. Of the 138 drivers who were permanently disconnected, 120 say they have been so without any warning and 123 have not been able to benefit from any recourse to contest the sanction.
“We are convinced that there are automatic disconnections”, assures Me Jérôme Giusti, lawyer of the LDH. In recent months, “we are witnessing chain disconnections,” says the lawyer, who formulates a hypothesis. “There was the ordinance on social dialogue (which provides for professional elections in the sector for 2022) and we suspect Uber of wanting to clean up in this perspective,” he says.
“A manual review” assures Uber
On February 24, an Amsterdam court sentenced Uber for making disconnections “based solely on automated processing,” the complaint wrote. A judgment contested by Uber which requested its annulment. Any disconnection “is taken after a manual review by our team of specialists,” said a spokesperson for the company, adding that drivers could at any time request access to their data except when “their disclosure would undermine rights of another person ”.
Jérôme Giusti, for his part, calls on the CNIL to “urgently seize the courts to put an end to these massive temporary or definitive disconnections”. “Today, it is a risk in the field of social rights that there are computers that process and make decisions,” he concluded.