General Motors agreed to pay $220 million to a coalition of state attorneys general who accused the automaker of selling Smart Driver data on drivers’ braking, speeding and trip habits without their knowledge. New York will receive $12,054,341 of the total, and the settlement was announced Oct. 29. GM sold the information to data brokers, and the brokers passed it to insurance companies.
The money goes to the states, not to drivers. Nothing in the attorneys general announcements sets up a claim form, restitution or a payment to an individual motorist, so there is nothing for GM owners to file. The settlement’s reach lies in the limits it puts on how GM collects and shares driving data from here on.
How Smart Driver data reached insurers
Smart Driver tracked trip frequency, start and end times, hard braking, hard acceleration and speeding, according to New York Attorney General Letitia James’s office. GM marketed it as a driving-safety tool and enrolled millions of drivers between 2016 and 2024. The data went to brokers under contracts that named insurance products as the intended use.
Insurers that bought from those brokers could change premiums based on what the data showed. New York’s release cites a New York Times investigation in which one GM owner was told by an insurance broker that a 22 percent increase in the premium was caused by data a broker had supplied. The release does not name that driver.
Anyone who drove a GM vehicle in those years and accepted a Smart Driver prompt at a dealership or in the OnStar app is the person the settlement is about, including drivers who never knew they had enrolled. More than 700,000 New York drivers were enrolled. A driver whose car insurance rose after a sign-up can ask the insurer what driving-data report sits behind the increase, the way the New York driver learned of the 22 percent rise from a broker.
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GM had told drivers it would not share data with insurers without express consent, the attorneys general say. Most sign-ups happened at dealerships, where employees allegedly accepted the program’s terms on customers’ behalf. GM paid bonuses based partly on enrollment numbers and ranked dealerships by them, which gave sales staff a reason to enroll as many customers as possible.
The OnStar app made the problem worse, according to the release. It wrongly told more than 370,000 enrolled drivers that they were not enrolled in Smart Driver. GM later unenrolled those drivers without disclosing the error and left their data with brokers and insurers, so a driver who saw “not enrolled” on a screen was still sending trip data downstream.
What GM must change under the consent decree
Washington Attorney General Nick Brown, whose office co-led the case with Oregon, said, “Washingtonians’ data is personal and valuable, which is why they should always have control over how it’s used.” Washington’s share is $12.3 million. The release says the settlement requires GM to get affirmative express consent before it collects or discloses driving and location data.
GM must also limit the driving data it collects and keep a comprehensive data privacy program. The settlement requires internal and third-party assessments of that program. A further requirement targets the sign-up practice itself: oversight and training at dealerships so customers are not enrolled in data collection without their consent.
Washington’s release counts a coalition of 36 attorneys general. Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Kentucky, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, Utah and Vermont sat on the executive committee beside the two co-leads. Another group joined, including Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin, along with New York and Massachusetts.
Massachusetts receives $5.7 million. Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell said, “Massachusetts drivers deserve to know their personal information and driving history will be protected.” Assistant Attorney General Camy Ruck of the Privacy and Responsible Technology Division handled the case, and the office can be reached for assistance at (617) 727-2200.
The federal order that came first
The Federal Trade Commission got to GM earlier. On Jan. 14, 2026, the commission voted 2-0 to finalize an order that bars GM and OnStar from sharing location and driving-habit data with consumer reporting agencies for five years. The FTC said that length was appropriate “given GM’s egregious betrayal of consumers’ trust.”
The FTC order also runs 20 years on consent: GM must get permission before collecting, using or sharing connected-vehicle data, with exceptions such as sending location to emergency responders. Every U.S. consumer must be able to ask for a copy of the data GM holds and ask for it to be deleted.
The FTC order lets drivers turn off precise location collection on vehicles that have the technology, and it lets them opt out of geolocation and driver-behavior collection with limited exceptions. For a driver worried about what is already in a broker’s files, the copy and deletion requests are the tools the federal order puts in consumers’ hands.
Premium damage is the part nobody has counted
None of the announcements says how many drivers paid more for insurance because of Smart Driver data. New York offers a single 22 percent example and the 700,000-driver enrollment figure, and the other states give only national numbers: millions enrolled, 370,000 told wrongly they were out. The settlement prices the conduct, not the harm to any one household.
That leaves the consent rule as the lasting change. A dealership employee can no longer accept terms on a customer’s behalf without GM exposing itself to the decree, and the attorneys general now hold a written standard for what counts as asking permission. The $220 million is the figure that made the announcement, but the consent requirement is what reaches the sales desk.
Signed up for Smart Driver at a dealership?
The $220 million goes to state treasuries, so drivers whose habits were sold have no payment coming from this settlement, and a premium that rose may already be part of their budget. Personal data that moved through brokers for eight years is also personal data worth locking down on the accounts it can touch.
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This article was produced with AI assistance and edited for accuracy against the sources linked above.
