GM Sold Your Driving Data to Insurers. The $220 Million Settlement Pays the States, Not You.

If you bought a Chevy, GMC, Buick or Cadillac with OnStar any time from 2016 to 2024, your braking, your speeding and the hour you left work may have been sold to your car insurer. On Thursday, GM agreed to pay $220 million over it.

None of that money is addressed to you.

Here’s how the attorneys general describe it. GM pitched Smart Driver as a coaching tool to make you a safer driver, and told drivers it wouldn’t share their data with insurers without express consent. Then it sold the data to brokers under contracts that said the data was for insurance products. The brokers sold it to insurers, who used it to set rates, “sometimes increasing their premiums.”

Plenty of people never really chose any of this. Most signed up at the dealership, in the same sign-up as OnStar, and the states say employees in many cases accepted the terms for them. Dealers were ranked on enrollment numbers, and salespeople earned bonuses based partly on it. Connecticut counts more than 10,283,000 Americans swept in.

The detail that stings: the OnStar app told more than 370,000 drivers they were not enrolled. They were. GM later unenrolled them quietly, without mentioning the mistake, and left their data with the brokers and insurers.

Now the math. Spread $220 million across 10.28 million drivers and it’s about $21 each. Don’t wait for it. The consent judgment sends the full amount to the states. Colorado’s cut is $7,177,775, held for the state’s costs and attorney’s fees, future enforcement, and “the payment of restitution, if any.”

If any. That’s the check.

The real relief is in the data terms, and it only helps you if you use it. The judgment takes effect November 30, 2026. GM must ask every company it fed driving data before January 16, 2025 to delete it, and it can’t send data to a consumer reporting agency again until that agency confirms the deletion or a legal hold that blocks it. Within 180 days, by late May 2027, GM has to delete the old data it still holds, with carve-outs for litigation and safety work.

There’s one catch, and it’s a smart one for GM. Within 90 days of November 30, it’s allowed to email you asking for consent to keep that old data. Say no, or just don’t answer. No consent, or 30 days of silence, means it gets deleted.

Do this now. Request your LexisNexis consumer disclosure report at consumer.risk.lexisnexis.com or call 866-897-8126. The CFPB says LexisNexis reports driving behavior data, which it calls Telematics OnDemand, for auto insurance pricing. You get one free report every 12 months and it has 15 days to deliver. If you see trips you never agreed to share, dispute them. Our C.L.U.E. report guide walks through the dispute.

Then, once the order is live, use GM’s deletion and copy requests. The judgment requires both, and the copy has to list the categories of companies that got your data.

Then shop. If your premium jumped after you drove a GM off the lot, the jump may have been your own braking data. Get two fresh quotes and run them through our insurance estimator. Our auto insurance hub covers what you can actually negotiate.

The fine goes to the states. The deletion rights go to you. Use them.

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