Your car is selling your data — SkimNews
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- GM received an unprecedented FTC penalty — a five-year ban on selling customer driving data to consumer reporting agencies and data brokers — after sharing Smart Driver data from its OnStar connected services with LexisNexis and Verisk.
- A 2024 New York Times investigation found some drivers saw their insurance rates rise after their data was shared, with many unaware their information was being collected through the OnStar Smart Driver feature.
- Mozilla Foundation researchers concluded in 2023 that every major car company had "horrible privacy and security," with customers forced to accept overlapping policies spanning the vehicle, connected services, smartphone app, and financing.
- Consumer Reports determined that "nearly every automaker" selling cars in the U.S. collects and shares driver behavior data with other companies.
- Three House Republicans introduced the DRIVER Act last December, which grants vehicle owners more control over their data but still allows automakers to collect and sell it to brokers — a concession privacy advocates reject.
- Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy proposed the "Freedom Car" concept last July, aiming to bar government requirements for automated driving systems or wireless data transmission in vehicles.
- Reddit users are crowdsourcing a list of new cars from 2019 onward that aren't digitally connected or transmitting data — and the list is "pretty short."
Why it matters: Privacy advocates argue the DRIVER Act and Freedom Car proposals fail to address automakers' financial incentive to collect and monetize data — the burden stays on individual drivers to discover and request deletion after the fact. With nearly every automaker collecting driver behavior data and insurance rates already rising for affected consumers, the data economy stays largely intact.
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