Rating passengers: from prohibited to mandatory for platforms

The short answer

Yes, it is now allowed. Law no. 59/2026 repealed former article 19(5), which prohibited "the creation and use of mechanisms for rating users by TVDE drivers or electronic platform operators". In its place, article 19(2)(c) requires platforms to provide a "trip rating service by the user and by the driver". The law does not say how rating works, what weight it has, or what it can be used for. Those silences are as important as the change itself.

What the 2018 law said

The original version was clear. Rating was a right of the passenger only: article 19(1)(d) required the platform to have "transparent, credible and reliable mechanisms for the user to rate the quality of the service". Conversely, para. 5 prohibited any mechanism for rating users by drivers or platforms, and a breach was a stand-alone administrative offence (article 25(2)(u), 2018 version).

The 2026 revision reverses this logic: it keeps rating by the passenger and adds rating by the driver, removing the ban and the related fine.

What the new item (c) says exactly

Three details of the text deserve attention. The first is the object: the law speaks of "rating the trip", not rating the passenger or the driver as people. It is a more neutral wording, although in practice rating a trip ends up falling on those who took part in it.

The second is where the rule was placed. Item (c) is in article 19(2), which groups what platforms must provide "for the purpose of users’ complaints about the service, or the exercise of supervisory powers by the competent bodies", alongside the complaints button and information on alternative dispute resolution. Rating is thus linked to complaints and supervision, not to commercial management.

The third is the nature of the obligation. The platform "must provide" the service. It is a duty of the platform, not of the driver or the passenger: neither is required to give a rating.

Practical implications for the driver

The driver can now record their rating of each trip, which gives them a way to flag problematic behaviour that the law did not previously allow. But rating does not widen the grounds for refusing a service. Article 8(1) still only allows refusal when the service involves manifestly impassable roads or places of obvious danger, when it is requested by people whose behaviour suggests they are dangerous, or when it is requested in a way that is incompatible with the law. A low score, on its own, does not appear on that list. Refusing outside these cases is an administrative offence attributable to the driver (article 25(2)(i) and article 25-B(1)).

Article 7 also remains in force: passengers cannot be refused on grounds of ancestry, age, sex, sexual orientation, disability, nationality, ethnic origin, language, religion or economic situation, among other factors. A rating motivated by these characteristics cannot be used to get around the ban on discrimination.

Practical implications for the passenger

The passenger keeps everything they had: rating the quality of the service, the complaints button and the Electronic Complaints Book. What now happens is that they are also rated. The law does not say whether the passenger must be told their score, whether the score is visible to the driver before accepting the trip, or whether the platform can use it to restrict access. Those rules, if they exist, will be in each app’s terms of use, which are standard-form contracts subject to the rules on standard contract terms and to scrutiny by the AMT (article 5(2) to (4)). See also how to complain about a TVDE service.

Privacy: what it protects and what it does not

The TVDE law has no specific rule on rating data. The general rules the regime itself invokes apply:

• platform operation complies with national and European law on personal data protection and other sensitive information (article 19(4));
• technological systems are verified and certified by an audit under the supervision of the National Data Protection Commission (article 20(2));
• compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation is a requirement of the platform’s technological capacity (article 17-A(2)(c));
• the CNPD is one of the supervisory bodies of the regime (article 24(h)).

There is one concrete protection worth knowing: if the trip hasvideo recording, the images cannot be used for performance assessment, commercial assessment or profiling of users or drivers (article 19-A(10)), and automated behavioural analysis and emotion detection are prohibited (para. 11). Ratings must be based on something other than the images.

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