GM just paid a record penalty for breaking California privacy law
GM just paid a record penalty for breaking California privacy law
Publish Date: 2026-05-08 18:15:00
Source Domain: www.rwcpulse.com
This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.
General Motors agreed to pay $12.75 million in civil penalties for selling driving data of hundreds of thousands of California motorists to data brokers, allegedly without their consent.
The settlement, announced Friday, is the largest ever for violations of the California Consumer Privacy Act, a 2018 law that requires companies to tell consumers about how their data is shared and to respect requests to stop the sharing.
It stemmed from an investigation by California Attorney General Rob Bonta, several county district attorneys, and the California Privacy Protection Agency, which enforces the privacy act. They said General Motors misled drivers who paid for the emergency roadside and navigation service OnStar and made approximately $20 million from the unlawful sale of their data between 2020 and 2024. The information included names, location information, driving behavior, and contact information, Bonta said, which went to the data brokers LexisNexis Risk Solutions and Verisk Analytics.
“This trove of information included precise and personal location data that could identify the everyday habits and movements of Californians,” Bonta said in a press release.
The settlement also requires GM to stop selling data to any consumer reporting agencies for five years and submit privacy assessments to the state, among other provisions. It followed a similar agreement between the Federal Trade Commission and GM earlier this year and California settlements with Honda and Ford over the past 14 months for their own violations of the privacy act.
California’s investigation of GM began after a 2024 New York Times investigation found GM collected data about millions of drivers nationwide and sold it to insurance companies in order to charge the drivers higher premiums. Californians were not impacted by those premium hikes because a state law prohibits insurers from using driving data…
