ItalyLogistics and transport2021–2024Foodinho (Glovo)
Algorithmic management of delivery riders
Italy's privacy regulator fined Glovo's Foodinho €5 million over rider algorithms that workers could not contest
Problem
A food delivery platform has to assign orders and shifts to tens of thousands of riders, check who is using each account and deal with poor performance. Doing this by hand at that scale is not practical.
Approach
Foodinho, the Glovo group's Italian company, used automated systems to rank riders with an "excellence" score that gave priority in booking shifts, to assign orders within a shift and to block or deactivate accounts. From July 2022 it also used facial recognition to verify riders' identity. The Garante had already fined it €2.6 million in 2021 over its algorithms. A new inquiry, opened after press reports that a rider's account was deactivated after he died in a road accident during a delivery, found that the systems lacked human review and a way to contest decisions, and that location data was collected even when the app was closed and shared without telling riders. In November 2024 the Garante fined Foodinho €5 million, banned the biometric processing and ordered changes to the app.
Results
Takeaway
The regulator focused on shift and account decisions that no person reviewed and riders could not challenge. The larger second fine followed an earlier sanction that had failed to change rider management.
Categories
- Size
- Large enterprise
- Industry
- Logistics and transport
- Business function
- Human resourcesProduction and quality
- Innovation type
- Process innovation
- AI technology
- Predictive analytics and MLComputer vision
- Adoption
- Built in-house
- Evidence
- Regulator, audit or court
Sources
Source summaries
The Garante fined Foodinho €5 million for unlawful processing of the data of more than 35,000 riders and banned its facial-recognition identity checks. The inquiry began after reports that a rider killed in a 2022 road accident had his account deactivated, and found that the excellence score and order assignment lacked human review and a right to contest. The regulator required new deactivation messages, checks by trained operators and switching off GPS when the app runs in the background.
The University of Padua Human Rights Centre describes the Garante's order of 13 November 2024 against Foodinho, covering more than 35,000 riders. It reports that until August 2023 the app tracked riders even when they were disconnected, and that suspended riders received an automatic message with no way to explain or contest. It gives the €5 million fine, the earlier €2.6 million fine of 2021 and the extended deadlines for deleting biometric data and complying.
Posteo reports the €5 million fine and the ban on facial recognition, which Foodinho had used for identity checks since July 2022. It describes the excellence score that could affect shift assignments without human review, and the requirement to let riders dispute deactivation. It also reports the July 2021 fine of €2.6 million over order-assignment algorithms, and notes that Glovo has belonged to Delivery Hero since 2022.
Full details are in the original sources.
