Bad automation
Foodinho and the algorithm with no appeal
Foodinho / Glovo · Gig delivery · Italy & Spain
A rider-management algorithm decided who got work — and gave riders no way to reach a human, state their case, or contest it. Italy’s regulator called that missing appeal the violation.
€2.6M
Garante fine · Jul 2021
~19,000
riders under the system
0
routes to human review
Solely-automated decisions, no Article 22 safeguards.
The record
- Italy’s data-protection authority, the Garante, fined Foodinho — Glovo’s Italian subsidiary — €2.6 million on 5 July 2021, its first decision concerning gig-economy riders. (EDPB; TechCrunch, Jul 2021)
- The regulator found the order-assignment algorithms ran with no procedures for riders to obtain human intervention, express their point of view, or contest decisions — which in some cases automatically excluded riders from work. (EDPB record; GDPRhub, decision 9675440)
- Around 19,000 riders were subject to the system. (GDPRhub)
The scoring nobody could see
Foodinho’s platform scored and ranked its riders and used those scores to allocate work — better scores, better slots; poor scores, fewer assignments or none. Riders could not see how the score was formed, why it moved, or how to challenge it. The system, in the regulator’s account, in some cases excluded riders from work automatically.
None of that is unusual for a gig platform. That is precisely why the case matters: the ordinary way these systems are built was found to be the problem.
No appeal is the violation
The Garante did not fine Foodinho for an inaccurate algorithm. It fined the company because a solely-automated decision affecting people’s livelihoods ran without the human-review, explanation and contest rights that Article 22 of the GDPR requires. The missing escape hatch was itself the breach — not a downstream consequence of one.
That inverts the usual intuition. Teams tend to treat “add a human appeal path” as a nice-to-have to bolt on later. Here, its absence was the finding a regulator could price at €2.6 million.
The lesson
Automating a high-stakes decision without a human-review-and-contest path isn’t a feature gap — regulators can treat the missing escape hatch as the violation itself.
How we’re reading this
Foodinho is Glovo’s Italian subsidiary; Glovo’s parent is Spain’s GlovoApp23. The €2.6M was the Garante’s 2021 decision; the authority continued to supervise the company afterward and issued a further order in 2024. We cite the 2021 findings, which concern automated-decision safeguards rather than the accuracy of any single dispatch.
Sources
- 01Riders: Italian SA says no to algorithms causing discrimination on platform Glovo-Foodinho
European Data Protection Board · Jul 6, 2021
- 02Italy fines Glovo-owned Foodinho over rider-ranking algorithm
TechCrunch · Jul 6, 2021
- 03Garante per la protezione dei dati personali — decision 9675440
GDPRhub · Jun 10, 2021
Compiled from public filings, court records, company statements and reputable press. Figures are attributed to their sources; allegations are labeled as such. Not legal or investment advice.