General Motors will pay $220 million to resolve claims from 36 states that it harvested and sold detailed driving and location data without proper consent. The agreement, announced Thursday, covers the Smart Driver program GM shut down last year and adds a third-party compliance audit to requirements the company already accepted from California and the Federal Trade Commission.
The program that started it
Smart Driver was a free feature inside GM’s connected-car apps that scored habits such as hard braking, rapid acceleration and seat-belt use. A 2022 New York Times investigation showed that GM and its OnStar unit fed the resulting geolocation and behavior data to brokers LexisNexis and Verisk, which then resold it to insurers. Those carriers could use the scores to adjust premiums, often without the driver’s knowledge.
The regulatory stack
The FTC finalized its own order in January, barring GM and OnStar from sharing certain consumer data and mandating explicit consent for future collection. Thursday’s multistate deal mirrors those transparency and consent rules but goes a step further by requiring an independent assessor to evaluate the privacy program GM has since built. The company says it will no longer sell information that can be linked to a specific person, vehicle or driving pattern, though anonymized data may still be shared with selected partners.
What comes next
GM is now rolling out a personal AI assistant for OnStar that ties cabin cameras, voice controls and live vehicle diagnostics into a single interface. The automaker says recordings are encrypted, time-limited and inaccessible to GM or OnStar, and that customers can manage permissions, though opting out will likely disable some features. The settlement makes clear that the price of those features will now include a consent form the driver actually reads.