Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton Sues General Motors for Illegally Harvesting and Selling Drivers’ Private Data to Corporate Giants, Including Insurance Companies

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has filed a lawsuit against General Motors (GM), alleging that the automotive giant engaged in deceptive and unlawful business practices by collecting and selling private driving data from over 1.5 million Texans without their knowledge or consent.

This lawsuit follows Paxton’s announcement in June 2024 that he had launched an investigation into several car manufacturers suspected of improperly harvesting vast amounts of data directly from vehicles.

The findings have been alarming, revealing a disturbing trend among companies leveraging invasive technologies to exploit unsuspecting consumers.

“Our investigation revealed that General Motors has engaged in egregious business practices that violated Texans’ privacy and broke the law. We will hold them accountable,” said Attorney General Paxton. “Companies are using invasive technology to violate the rights of our citizens in unthinkable ways.”

The crux of the lawsuit centers around GM’s use of technology installed in most vehicles manufactured since 2015. This technology allegedly collects, records, analyzes, and transmits detailed driving data every time a driver uses their vehicle, according to the press release.

Shockingly, GM sold this sensitive information to various third parties, including insurance companies, who used it to generate “Driving Scores” aimed at influencing insurance premiums.

“A customer’s Driving Score was based on a series of “factors” developed by General Motors that were supposedly indicative of “bad” driving behavior and included behavior such as (1) unique identifiers of a trip; (2) trip mileage; (3) hard braking and acceleration events; (4) speed events over 80 miles per hour; and (5) other behavior tracked by OnStar Vehicle Diagnostics (“OVD”). Under the Verisk Agreement, GM provided Verisk with the Driving Data necessary to determine whether a customer exhibited any “bad” driving behaviors,” according to the lawsuit.

This sensitive information includes location tracking, driving habits, personal communications within the vehicle’s system, customer ID, name, and home address.

Attorney General Paxton emphasized the betrayal felt by consumers: “Millions of American drivers wanted to buy a car, not a comprehensive surveillance system that unlawfully records information about every drive they take and sells their data to any company willing to pay for it.”

The lawsuit reveals that GM misled customers during the onboarding process for its products, including OnStar Smart Driver. Many were coerced into enrolling under the false pretense that failing to do so would result in the deactivation of crucial safety features in their vehicles.

However, what customers did not realize was that by enrolling, they were inadvertently consenting to GM’s extensive collection and sale of their driving data—a blatant violation of consumer trust.

“In 2015, General Motors entered into the first of many agreements to sell its customers’ Driving Data. Over the course of nearly a decade, General Motors continued to sell, re-sell, and have other companies license out access to its customers’ Driving Data, oftentimes in a manner it knew would financially harm those customers. On information and belief, General Motors sold over 16 million of its customers’ Driving Data to other companies, including the data of 1.8 million Texans,” according to the lawsuit.

You can read the lawsuit here.

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