21 January 2025
In a recent settlement with the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), General Motors (GM) consented to a five-year ban on selling or using geolocation and driving behavior data. GM’s OnStar service and its now-canceled Smart Driver program gathered and sold data from millions of cars without explicit customer authorization led to this FTC ban.
According to the FTC’s investigation, GM collected users’ precise geolocation information and driving behaviors by using enrollment procedures for OnStar and Smart Driver. This information, which was tracked as often as every three seconds, was sold to insurance companies and other third-party businesses, who used it to determine rates or refuse coverage, usually without the customer’s knowledge.
The proposed settlement would ban GM, General Motors Holdings, and OnStar—all companies owned by the General Motors Company—from providing consumer reporting agencies with covered driver data for the following five years.
Before collecting car data, the companies must have users’ express approval. Additionally, the businesses must set up a system that enables customers to view and request the erasure of their data.
Customers should also be able to restrict the amount of data that is collected from their cars by opting out of geolocation data collection and disabling the gathering of precise geolocation data.
About US Federal Trade Commission (FTC)
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is an independent agency of the federal government, established in 1914, with the primary mission of protecting consumers and promoting competition. It enforces antitrust laws to prevent anti-competitive business practices, such as monopolies and cartels, which can harm consumers and stifle innovation.
