GM Agrees to $220 Million Settlement Over Secret Driver Data Collection and Sales

General Motors will pay $220 million to settle allegations that it secretly gathered drivers’ location data and habits behind the wheel, then sold the information to data brokers who passed it on to insurance companies for rate-setting purposes, officials said.

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, along with a bipartisan coalition of 36 state attorneys general, reached the agreement, bringing an end to an investigation into the automaker’s data practices that covered nearly a decade.

Michigan is set to receive about $7.2 million under the deal. The settlement does not provide direct refunds or restitution to individual drivers, although a separate nationwide class-action lawsuit seeking money damages is still pending in court.

Investigators said GM enrolled millions of drivers in its Smart Driver feature between 2016 and 2024. The company promoted the tool as a way to help customers improve their driving, while telling them their information would not be shared with insurers without explicit permission.

According to the coalition, GM instead sold the detailed records to data brokers under arrangements that identified the data for insurance use. Those brokers then resold the driver profiles to insurers, who used them to assess risk and set coverage prices.

The records included detailed driving metrics such as trip frequency, start and end times, hard braking, rapid acceleration, and speeding. Insurers allegedly relied on those metrics to raise premiums for affected motorists.

Many motorists were enrolled without realizing it when they bought vehicles at GM dealerships, where employees had incentives to sign up as many people as possible for OnStar services. In several cases, dealership staff accepted terms and service agreements on behalf of buyers without telling them.

Technical problems also concealed the tracking from vehicle owners. The OnStar mobile app incorrectly told more than 370,000 drivers that they were not enrolled in Smart Driver, even though GM continued collecting and selling their trip data. When the company discovered the software mistake, it quietly removed those drivers from the program without notifying them, leaving the previously collected information with outside brokers and insurers.

GM ended the Smart Driver program after The New York Times reported on the tracking practices.

“Drivers deserve to know what information about them is being collected and how it may affect their wallets,” Nessel said in a statement. “Discovering after the fact that a company has been tracking and selling their driving data without their consent is unacceptable. This settlement will hold GM accountable for its past conduct and secure meaningful safeguards so drivers have greater control over their information in the future.”

Going forward, the agreement prohibits GM from collecting or sharing driving or location data without clear, affirmative consent from motorists first. The company must also create a broader privacy program, conduct regular internal and external data reviews, limit how much driving data it keeps, and require dealership training to prevent unauthorized enrollments.

The coalition includes attorneys general from Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Florida, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin.