General Motors Fined Again For Violating Driver Privacy

General Motors has agreed to pay $12.75 million to settle a California investigation into how the automaker handled driver data collected through its OnStar connected-services platform.

The agreement, announced last week by California Attorney General Rob Bonta, focuses on accusations that GM sold detailed driving information from hundreds of thousands of vehicle owners to third-party data brokers without adequately informing them.

The settlement still requires court approval, but California’s terms would restrict how GM can collect, use, and share driving data moving forward, including a five-year ban on selling personal driving information to outside brokers.

According to the state, the data in question went far beyond anonymous telemetry. Investigators say GM shared customer names, phone numbers, home addresses, and highly detailed location information tied to individual vehicles. That included GPS-based records showing where drivers traveled and where they parked.

California also alleged GM tracked behaviors such as speeding and hard acceleration between 2016 and 2024 through products linked to the company’s OnStar ecosystem.

For years, connected-car technology has been pervasively morphing from a convenience feature into a rolling data generator that automakers see as a booming income generator as profit margins shrink across the business. Systems originally marketed for navigation, roadside assistance, or crash response collect a plethora of detailed behavioral information in the background.

Good for the automakers—the problem is that customers often have little or no understanding of how much information is being harvested or where it ends up. That's why, in my opinion, everyone should just drive a 2007 Ford Crown Victoria.

According to the California investigation, GM reportedly generated around $20 million nationwide from the sale of people's driving data.

GM says the settlement relates specifically to its discontinued “Smart Driver” product, which the company shut down in 2024. That same program already caused similar legal problems for GM in Texas back in 2024 and was subject to a Federal Trade Commission investigation last year. The FTC described GM’s handling of driver data as an “egregious betrayal of consumers’ trust.”

GM and OnStar agreed with the FTC to halt the sale of sensitive geolocation and driver-behavior information to consumer reporting agencies for five years. For its part, GM says the agreement reflects steps it has already taken to improve its privacy practices and emphasized that customers should have greater transparency and control over how their data is used.

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