GM and OnStar accused of selling drivers’ data without consent, causing insurance rates to spike. Could your car be driving up your insurance bill?

It says that data included vehicle speed, driver seat belt status, hard acceleration and braking and GPS locations, among other information. It allegedly sold the info to data brokers, who then sold it to “insurance carriers who used it to increase consumers’ rates.”

“GM turned a perennial symbol of American freedom and autonomy — the automobile — into Big Brother on wheels,” the lawsuit claims, adding that GM’s “onboarding” of new customers followed a “deceptively designed sales flow” that ensured customers were “unwittingly” enrolled “in GM’s Driving Data collection scheme.”

The lawsuit doesn’t say how much the alleged sale of driver data caused individual insurance rates to rise. When asked to clarify a dollar amount, the Montana Department of Justice referred Moneywise to their official press release, which doesn’t contain that information.

Meanwhile, a GM spokesperson told Moneywise that “GM remains committed to protecting consumers’ privacy, and we are reviewing the complaint about the [OnStar] Smart Driver program, which was discontinued in 2024.”

When privacy takes a back seat, insurance premiums can jump

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton launched a similar suit against GM in 2024. In January 2026, GM and the FTC finalized an order to settle the company’s “egregious betrayal of consumers’ trust”. They allegedly compiled and sold their driving data “without adequately notifying consumers and obtaining their affirmative consent.”

As part of the order, GM agreed to a five-year ban on sharing driver data with consumer reporting agencies and, for the next 20 years, must get “affirmative express consent from consumers” before collecting or sharing it. They must also allow consumers to obtain copies of the data, delete it and opt out of the collection process if desired.

Data tracking in the auto world is known as “telematics” or usage-based insurance (UBI). Loretta Worters, of the Insurance Information Institute, told Moneywise that many insurers offer it to customers in exchange for potentially (but not always) lower premiums.

She said “insurance companies may use driving behavior data to better understand a motorist’s risk profile,” including “mileage, driving frequency, hard braking, rapid acceleration and other driving patterns that may be associated with the likelihood of an accident.”

Worters added that transparency about its collection and use “is essential to maintaining consumer trust.”

A 2025 Consumer Reports (CR) survey found that the median annual savings for telematics users was $120, while a separate CR investigation referenced the GM and FTC order and found that “nearly every automaker that sells cars in the U.S. is similarly collecting and sharing so-called ‘driver behavior data’ with other companies and continues to do so.”

They warned that “you may agree [to data collection] without knowing you’ve done so” because the permissions can be buried in the privacy policy and consent forms customers sign after buying a vehicle.

Michael DeLong, a Research and Advocacy Associate with the Consumer Federation of America, told Moneywise that insurers could use such data to “hike drivers’ rates in a number of ways.” He pointed to GM collecting hard braking data, which is “one of the factors used in telematics, so companies would hike rates on people who have high incidences of hard braking.” GM, he said, also “collected data on driving over 80 miles per hour, so companies would increase your premium based on that.” He also warned that GPS coordinates showing where you’re driving could also lead to rate increases.

One 2024 consumer privacy class-action lawsuit, Carnine v. General Motors LLC, alleged that “Plaintiff Carnine saw his insurance premiums more than double in the past 18 months, and his premiums are now approximately $8,000 per year” despite having “no accidents, tickets, or insurance claims in the past five years.” It blamed “GM’s wrongful sharing of driver data, including erroneous and inaccurate data” for the hike.

How to avoid being asleep at the wheel with driving data

Consumer rights attorney Amy Ginsburg, of the Ginsburg Law Group, P.C., told Moneywise that the “U.S. has no single federal privacy law that covers car data,” so the question of where to draw the line on data sharing consent “comes from a patchwork of laws.”