If you drive a GM vehicle and your insurance premiums mysteriously went up in the last few years, well - your car may have ratted you out. General Motors has agreed to settle a California data privacy lawsuit for $12.75 million after being accused of selling driver location and behavioral data to insurance companies and data brokers. Your car: the world's most expensive informant.
What actually happened here
According to a proposed settlement filed last Friday and reported by Reuters and The Verge, GM didn't just quietly collect data from its OnStar service - it allegedly sold that information to third parties, including data brokers who then passed it along to insurers. The kind of data we're talking about includes location history and driving habits. You know, the stuff that insurance companies absolutely love to use to justify charging you more money.
GM found itself buried under multiple lawsuits after a 2024 New York Times investigation blew the lid off the whole operation. Once that story dropped, it became very clear that a lot of GM drivers had no idea their vehicles were essentially filing reports on them.
What's changing (for now)
Under the terms of the proposed settlement, GM has agreed to stop selling customer data to data brokers for five years. California drivers will also get the ability to actually opt out of having OnStar collect their location data at all. So you can, theoretically, make your car slightly less of a surveillance device.
Five years is a curious number though. Not forever. Not "we're done with this business model." Just five years. Make of that what you will.
Why this matters beyond GM
This isn't really a GM story. It's a "your car is a data collection machine and you probably didn't know" story. Modern connected vehicles are packed with sensors, always-on services, and software that tracks more about your daily life than most apps on your phone. The difference is nobody made you click "agree" at 70 mph on a Tuesday morning.
Data brokers sit in the middle of all of this, hoovering up information from companies like GM and selling it downstream to insurers, marketers, and anyone else willing to pay. It's a largely invisible industry that has enormous consequences for regular people - like, say, your car insurance bill.
The settlement still needs court approval, but if it goes through, California drivers at least get some controls back. The rest of the country? Still very much along for the ride.
