General Motors is set to pay $220 million in a settlement with the attorneys general of 35 states and the District of Columbia after claims that the automaker sold drivers’ location and behavior data to brokers without permission.
GM’s Smart Driver program sits at the heart of the settlement. The driver monitoring system was meant to log driving data to help monitor driving habits, and was active between 2016 and 2024. However, the program regularly logged hard braking and speeding events, which GM then sold to data brokers under contracts that were used for insurance products, the group of attorneys general claims.
“The coalition’s investigation found that in reality, GM sold this information to data brokers under contracts that specified the data was to be used for insurance products. The data brokers sold the data to insurance companies, who could then change the drivers’ premiums based on their driving habits. GM did not disclose to drivers that their data would be sold for this purpose,” a statement from New York attorney general Letitia James reads.
At its height, GM had millions of drivers enrolled in the Smart Driver program, before it canceled the program in 2024 after customers raised privacy concerns. The settlement also requires GM to limit driving data collection, and to obtain explicit driver consent before collecting or sharing it. This builds on GM’s January 2025 agreement with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission not to disclose vehicle geolocation and driver behavior data to consumer reporting agencies for five years.
“Safer, more helpful and personalized experiences are enabled by connected vehicle data, and GM is committed to being clear about what information is used, how it’s protected, and the choices customers have about what they share,” a GM spokesperson said to Reuters.
Over 370,000 drivers enrolled in Smart Driver weren’t even aware that the program was tracking their driving, the attorneys general claim. The OnStar app apparently said that they were not enrolled in Smart Driver before GM quietly un-enrolled them without notification. One driver even reportedly faced a 22 percent increase in insurance premiums because of “personal driving information provided by a data broker.”
Many customers signed up for Smart Driver at dealerships when purchasing a new vehicle; GM offered OnStar and Smart Driver as a one-step package deal to customers buying new vehicles, with heavy incentives for dealerships to increase sign-up rates. New York AG James claims that GM offered bonuses based in part on how many customers they signed up for GM’s connected vehicle services, including Smart Driver, and even ranked dealerships based on their enrollment numbers.
“People bought a car, not a tracking device,” as Oregon attorney general Dan Rayfield put it in a statement.
Settlement money will be doled out to consumers in Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Hawai’i, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, and the District of Columbia. GM previously paid $12.75 million to settle a California investigation into an alleged sale of drive data to brokers.
A New York transplant hailing from the Pacific Northwest, Emmet White has a passion for anything that goes: cars, bicycles, planes, and motorcycles. After learning to ride at 17, Emmet worked in the motorcycle industry before joining Autoweek in 2022 and Road & Track in 2024. The woes of alternate side parking have kept his fleet moderate, with a 2014 Volkswagen Jetta GLI and a BMW 318i E30 street parked in his Queens community.
