- The lawsuit claims GM collected data from over 100,000 vehicles in Arkansas without consent.
- GM allegedly analyzed acceleration, braking, and late-night driving percentages from customers.
- This latest suit follows a New York Times report from 2024 revealing GM sold data to two brokers.
If you thought your car was just a mode of transportation, think again, as it’s a goldmine for data brokers. The office of Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin has filed a lawsuit against General Motors and OnStar for allegedly selling driving data to insurance companies.
This lawsuit is just the latest in a growing list of cases where car manufacturers are under fire for collecting and selling user data. In August of last year, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued General Motors for similar accusations, and recently, Ford, Hyundai, Toyota, and FCA have all faced similar suits.
Read: Texas Probes Ford, Hyundai, Toyota, FCA For Selling Sensitive Driver Data
The lawsuit, filed in Phillips County Circuit Court, claims that GM has been tracking and selling detailed customer driving data to third-party brokers for over a decade. Among the data allegedly collected by GM are vehicle speed, percentage of high-speed driving, late-night driving habits, distance traveled, acceleration, and braking patterns. It paints a picture of a company keen to know everything about its customers’ driving habits—even when they’re cruising down empty highways at 3 a.m.
Data Collection Without Consent
According to the lawsuit, GM has been selling this data for years without obtaining explicit consent from drivers. It is said to have included the information of over 100,000 vehicles in Arkansas alone.
Even more concerning is the claim that GM wasn’t just collecting data from OnStar users, but from anyone who used any GM mobile app or activated an internet connection in their car. In other words, if you’ve ever had Wi-Fi in a GM vehicle, they may have been tracking you, even if you never signed up for OnStar services.
Allegations of “Dark Patterns”
The suit also accuses GM of using so-called “dark patterns”, a design technique aimed at tricking customers into agreeing to terms they might otherwise reject by “taking advantage of consumers’ cognitive biases to keep them from material information needed to make fully-informed decisions.”
It’s alleged that GM sold driving data to third-party exchanges, first receiving a lump sum for the initial batch, then continuing to rake in periodic payments for additional data sent over the following years.
Arkansas’ investigation comes roughly a year after The New York Times revealed that several automakers were selling sensitive driving data and sharing it with insurance companies. GM was found to have been selling information to data brokers LexisNexis Risk Solutions and Verisk.
During a press conference on the lawsuit attended by Eldorado News, Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin emphasized the lack of transparency in these practices. “No one was informed this was happening. Even if an Arkansan carefully read every word on the (sign up) screen, all the disclosures, all the link policies, spent whatever time it would take to do that, and we’ve all been faced with that, usually (when you’re) in a hurry, when we just click and move on … that information, still would not inform the customer of GM’s actual conduct.”
In other words, the “fine print” is apparently a lot more fine than consumers might have realized.
