"GM banned from sharing driving and location data with insurance companies", 17 January 2025

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The Federal Trade Commission alleges that GM and OnStar — GM’s subscription-based in-vehicle safety and security system — collected, used, and sold drivers’ precise geolocation data and driving behavior information from millions of vehicles without adequately notifying consumers and obtaining their consent.

... the agency issued a proposed order to ban the company from selling such data to consumer reporting agencies for five years. 

In its complaint, the FTC alleged that GM used a “misleading enrollment process” to get consumers to sign up for OnStar. Some users reported being unaware that they signed up for OnStar’s Smart Driver feature, which promised to use driving data to help drivers improve their vehicle’s performance and encourage safer driving. 

“GM monitored and sold people’s precise geolocation data and driver behavior information, sometimes as often as every three seconds,” FTC Chair Lina M. Khan said in a statement. 

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Thursday’s settlement with the FTC follows an investigation by The New York Times’ Kashmir Hill, who found GM had been collecting details about its customers’ driving habits — including every instance of hard braking, late-night driving, and speeding — and selling the records to insurance companies and third-party data brokers. The result was that drivers began seeing higher insurance premiums, but couldn’t figure out why. 

The potential misuse of customers’ data goes beyond increased insurance premiums. A person’s geolocation data can reveal the most intimate details of a person’s life...

As part of the FTC’s proposed order — if approved by a court — GM and OnStar will be banned from disclosing data to consumer reporting agencies, and would also need to obtain affirmative express consent from consumers before collecting any vehicle data in the future. The automaker would also need to allow customers to obtain and delete their data, as well as limit the data collection from their vehicles. 

GM said in a statement that the FTC’s consent order captures “steps we’ve already taken to establish choices for customer data collection and communication about how the information is used.” The automaker said that last year it ended its Smart Driver program, unenrolled customers, and stopped selling telematics data to analytics companies LexisNexis and Verisk.

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