Worker Info Exchange

Worker Info Exchange (WIE) is the London-based non-profit helping platform workers reclaim the data their employers collect on them at work, using subject access requests, strategic litigation, and worker-controlled data trusts to challenge the algorithmic management systems that allocate work, set pay, score performance, and trigger dismissals across the UK and European gig economies. WIE has been the principal civil-society driver of the body of GDPR Article 22 case law on worker protection against automated decision-making, and its Managed by Bots report and robo-firing litigation against Uber and Ola Cabs together constitute the corpus's most sustained data-rights-as-worker-power demonstration to date.

Founding and structure

WIE was founded by James Farrar, the lead claimant in Aslam & Farrar v Uber — the 2021 UK Supreme Court ruling that Uber drivers are workers rather than independent contractors — to operationalise data subject access rights under the EU General Data Protection Regulation as a worker-power tool. Farrar had previously worked at a major software company before becoming an Uber driver in 2014 and, after losing his account to a star-rating downgrade he could not see or contest, organising what became the first dedicated UK trade union for private-hire minicab drivers within the Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain. That branch later became the App Drivers and Couriers Union (ADCU), the UK's largest trade union for licensed private-hire drivers and couriers, and WIE was established to act as ADCU's data-trust and digital-rights arm — the technical-legal partner that turns members' subject access data into collective evidence usable for bargaining, litigation, and regulatory complaints. Farrar's original 2016 GDPR data access request against Uber is the organisational origin story.

WIE operates under two associated legal vehicles. Its original UK entity, Worker Info Exchange Limited, was incorporated on 19 October 2018 and dissolved on 21 December 2021; the current operational organisation has been publicly active since 2020 and is paired with Stichting WIE International — a Dutch non-profit foundation — which is the legal vehicle for collective action under Netherlands law where most of WIE's Amsterdam Court litigation against Uber and Ola Cabs has been brought. Judy Kuszewski, Chief Executive of Sancroft International, joined the WIE board of directors in 2020. The advisory board carries Professor Veena Dubal, Professor Lilian Edwards (Newcastle University), Reuben Binns (University of Oxford), and Silkie Carlo, Director of Big Brother Watch. Cansu Safak — formerly of the Ada Lovelace Institute, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, and Big Brother Watch — has led WIE's research practice since 2021.

Approach and tactics

WIE's programmatic structure is organised around three pillars. The Data Access pillar files data subject access and portability requests under GDPR Articles 15 and 20 on behalf of platform workers, surfacing how work is allocated, pay determined, and performance assessed — and revealing systematic patterns of platform non-compliance in the process. The Data Investigations pillar conducts targeted analyses of recovered data to evidence unfair algorithmic decision-making, with findings deployed both publicly (through reports, journalism, and parliamentary engagement) and judicially (through litigation against unlawful dismissals and discriminatory profiling). The Data Trusts pillar supports unions and worker organisations to aggregate the subject-access data they recover into collective evidentiary records — the corpus's clearest operationalisation of the data-trust model for worker power, paired with ADCU as the principal trade-union partner. The unifying method is to convert individual rights granted under European data-protection law (a registered set of subject-access entitlements) into a collective worker-controlled evidentiary infrastructure, on the theory that an asymmetric labour relationship cannot be addressed by individuals alone exercising rights against platforms with vast technical and legal capacity.

Managed by Bots report

WIE's signature publication is Managed by Bots — Data Driven Exploitation in the Gig Economy, published on 13 December 2021 and co-authored by Research Lead Cansu Safak and Director James Farrar with a foreword by Bama Athreya, then a Fellow of the Open Society Foundations. The report is the first sustained civil-society documentation of how seven major gig platforms — Amazon Flex, Bolt, Deliveroo, Free Now, Just Eat, Ola, and Uber — use algorithmic systems to allocate work, set pay, score performance, run fraud-detection facial recognition, and dismiss workers, and how they routinely obstruct workers' attempts to access the underlying data needed to assess fairness or contest decisions. It is structured in three parts: an investigation of algorithmic-management harms grounded in case studies (including Pa Edrissa Manjang, wrongfully deactivated by flawed facial-recognition, and Aweso Mowlana, falsely flagged for account-sharing through geolocation misinterpretation); a procedural account of the obstacles workers face in exercising GDPR Article 15 data subject access rights; and a survey of relevant GDPR case law. The report was published as a joint campaign with Privacy International, ADCU, and Big Brother Watch under the Managed by Bots banner, with named cooperation from the Equality and Human Rights Commission and Transport for London, and Athreya's foreword framing the report's findings as the "misclassification 2.0" successor question — the way algorithmic control conceals employment relationships even where workers have already secured statutory recognition.

The robo-firing litigation arc

WIE's longest-running advocacy artefact is the linked Amsterdam Court litigation against Uber and Ola Cabs over what it terms "robo-firing" — the platforms' practice of automatically deactivating drivers' accounts on the basis of algorithmic fraud scoring and other automated profiling with no meaningful human review. WIE and the App Drivers and Couriers Union filed the original complaint in 2020 on behalf of three UK drivers from London and Birmingham, with the Dutch jurisdiction selected because Uber's European headquarters are in Amsterdam.

After the Amsterdam District Court ruled against the drivers at first instance, the Amsterdam Court of Appeal on 4 April 2023 delivered three linked judgments (ECLI:NL:GHAMS:2023:793, 796, and 804) finding for the drivers. The court held that several Uber and Ola automated processes — ride assignment, dynamic pricing, driver rating, fraud-probability scoring, and account deactivation — qualify as automated decision-making within the meaning of Article 22 of the GDPR; that the limited human review Uber pointed to was "not much more than a purely symbolic act"; and that the platforms could not invoke trade-secrets exemptions to withhold information about how the underlying algorithms work. The ruling was framed by TechCrunch as the most consequential European test case to date for GDPR Article 22 worker protections, and Farrar's response — that the ruling ends "information asymmetry & trade secrets protections relied upon by gig economy employers to exploit workers" — has anchored the case's framing in the subsequent labour-and-data-rights register. The drivers were represented by Anton Ekker of Ekker Advocatuur, with WIE as institutional claimant alongside ADCU.

Uber's response to the ruling was to provide post-decision human-review disclosures without surrendering the algorithmic-transparency information the court had ordered. On 5 October 2023 the District Court of Amsterdam ruled that Uber had failed to comply and imposed a €584,000 penalty for the two named dismissed drivers with a continuing accrual of €4,000 per day until compliance. Farrar's comment — "Uber habitually flouts the law and defies the orders of even the most senior courts" — and Ekker's statement that the non-compliance was "highly objectionable" together became the documented case for the gap between European data-protection rulings on paper and platform practice in the field. The penalty case has subsequently been picked up in the wider European-DPA regulatory record, including the Dutch Data Protection Authority's separate €290 million fine against Uber for unlawful transfers of driver data to the United States.

Stichting WIE International and the dynamic-pay claim

On 20 November 2025 Stichting WIE International announced collective proceedings against Uber at the Amsterdam District Court under the Netherlands' collective-redress law, escalating the WIE litigation arc from algorithmic-transparency rights into a frontal challenge against Uber's algorithmic pay-setting system. The claim alleges three distinct GDPR breaches: that Uber's "Up Front Pricing" algorithm — which replaced fixed per-time-and-distance rates and a flat 25% commission with variable real-time rates and commissions — constitutes unlawful automated decision-making about workers' livelihoods; that Uber has used drivers' personal data to train machine-learning models without their consent; and that Uber has transferred driver data to the United States in breach of European data-protection requirements. Farrar's framing of the action — that "Uber has leveraged artificial intelligence and machine learning to implement deeply intrusive and exploitative pay-setting systems that have damaged the livelihoods of thousands of drivers" — places the dynamic-pay claim inside the broader civil-society register on the labour-AI question, and makes WIE the corpus's first organisational entry whose primary litigation register is collective worker-side action against an AI-driven pay-setting system.

Coalition role and partners

WIE sits inside the UK and European platform-labour digital-rights coalition lineage. Its principal long-running partnership is with the App Drivers and Couriers Union, with which it has jointly filed every major piece of UK platform-driver litigation since 2020 and which functions as the trade-union side of WIE's data-trust model. The Managed by Bots report establishes the second principal partnership with Privacy International, which co-published the report and ran the linked "Managed by Bots" public campaign; the report's named partners also include Big Brother Watch, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, and Transport for London. Silkie Carlo's presence on WIE's advisory board confirms the WIE/BBW coalition tie at the governance level as well as at the campaign level. WIE has additionally demanded that Microsoft suspend Uber's Face API license over the racially discriminatory facial-recognition fraud-checks documented in the Managed by Bots case studies — extending its critique from platform operators to the upstream cloud-AI vendors providing the underlying biometric infrastructure.

Funding

WIE discloses a funder set of the Open Society Foundations, the Mozilla Foundation, the Digital Freedom Fund, the Omidyar Network, and Trust for London. OSF's Migration Initiative has additionally supported WIE editorially through Bama Athreya's foreword to Managed by Bots and the OSF/TBD Community profile of Farrar that helped establish WIE's international visibility. Digital Freedom Fund and Trust for London do not yet have funder entries in the corpus.

Posture in the movement

WIE's distinctive contribution to the make-AI-good movement is its operationalisation of the data-trust model as a worker-power instrument — converting individual data subject access rights granted under European data-protection law into a collective evidentiary infrastructure that supports trade-union bargaining, strategic litigation, and regulatory complaints against the algorithmic management systems that govern the working lives of platform workers. The combination of the Managed by Bots documentation register, the multi-year Amsterdam robo-firing litigation that established Article 22 protections against automated dismissals, the €584,000 penalty ruling that documented platform non-compliance with algorithmic-transparency orders, and the 2025 Stichting WIE International dynamic-pay collective action against Uber's AI-driven pay-setting system together make WIE the corpus's principal organisational anchor on the platform-worker / algorithmic-management movement area. In the corpus's terms it is the UK / European structural counterpart on the worker-data-rights side to the Kenyan content-moderator litigation that Foxglove, Nzili and Sumbi Advocates, and the African Content Moderators Union have anchored on the African continent, and the data-trust-and-union pairing it sustains with the App Drivers and Couriers Union is the corpus's clearest single instantiation of the data-trust model in active worker-organising practice.