General Motors has agreed to pay a staggering $220 million to settle allegations that it collected and sold the personal driving information of millions of its customers without their knowledge or meaningful consent. The settlement was announced Thursday, October 29, by a coalition of 36 state attorneys general. According to the states, the information involved nearly 10.3 million drivers and included details about how people drove their vehicles and where they traveled. Some of that information eventually reached automobile insurance companies, where it could influence the premiums customers paid.
At the center of the controversy is GM's OnStar Smart Driver program, which was promoted as a tool to help motorists understand and improve their driving habits. On the surface, that sounds perfectly reasonable. Modern vehicles already contain sophisticated computers that monitor everything from vehicle speed to braking and acceleration. The problem, according to state investigators, was what happened to the information after GM collected it.
The data included driving speeds, hard braking, rapid acceleration and location information that could reveal where customers drove and parked their vehicles. GM sold information to data brokers, including LexisNexis Risk Solutions and Verisk Analytics, which developed products for insurance companies. Those products could be used to evaluate drivers and help insurers determine how much to charge for coverage. State officials alleged that customers were not adequately informed that information collected through their vehicles could be sold for purposes completely separate from the connected services they believed they were receiving.
Think about the implications. A driver might brake hard to avoid an accident, accelerate quickly to merge safely onto a highway or travel through a particular neighborhood for perfectly legitimate reasons. Yet individual driving events, without the surrounding circumstances, could become part of a profile used to evaluate that driver's insurance risk. The concern isn't simply that vehicles can collect this information. It's whether the owner knows what is being collected, understands who receives it and has genuinely agreed to that arrangement.
The investigation also raised questions about how customers were enrolled in connected-vehicle programs. State officials alleged that dealership employees were sometimes encouraged through financial incentives to enroll customers and that the enrollment process did not adequately explain the potential sale of driving information. Customers could reasonably believe they were signing up for safety, navigation or other useful vehicle services without realizing their driving behavior might be used for insurance-related purposes.
This is not GM's first encounter with regulators over the issue. In May, California announced a separate $12.75 million settlement involving the sale of driving and location information collected through OnStar. California investigators said GM had earned approximately $20 million nationwide from selling information to LexisNexis and Verisk. Earlier federal action by the Federal Trade Commission also imposed restrictions on GM's sharing of sensitive driving information. GM discontinued its Smart Driver program after the controversy became public.
The new $220 million multistate settlement represents a substantial escalation in the financial consequences of those practices. It also raises a broader question for the entire automobile industry: Just because a manufacturer has the technology to collect information about its customers, does that give it the right to profit from selling that information? Connected vehicles offer tremendous benefits, including emergency assistance, navigation, diagnostics and safety features, but those benefits should not require customers to surrender control of their personal information without understanding what they are agreeing to.
My advice to every car owner is to review the privacy settings in your vehicle and its connected smartphone applications. Pay particular attention to driving-score programs, insurance-related services and permissions involving location tracking or information sharing. Ask questions before enrolling, and don't assume that a feature described as helping you become a safer driver is necessarily being used only for that purpose.
The bottom line: When you buy a vehicle, you should know what you're paying for. You should also know whether somebody else is making money from the information that vehicle collects about you.
Editorial Credit: Colinmthompson/Shutterstock.com. GM Headquarters, Detroit. October 14th, 2025