GM to Pay $220 Million Over Sale of Drivers' Driving Data

General Motors has agreed to pay $220 million after owners of its vehicles discovered that information about how they drove had been sold to insurance companies. The settlement puts a price on a practice that many drivers did not know was happening until their own data surfaced.

The information came from Smart Driver, a GM program that tracks driving habits and turns them into a score. Insurers can use scores like these when deciding what to charge a customer, which is why the sale of the underlying data carried real consequences for the people it described. Owners said they had not understood that the information would leave GM's hands.

The Federal Trade Commission had already accused GM of collecting and sharing this kind of data without clear consent. That earlier action focused on restricting how the company could handle driving and location information going forward. The $220 million payment adds a financial penalty to those restrictions and shows that regulators are willing to treat connected-car data as sensitive personal information.

For drivers, the case is a reminder to check what their car's apps and connected services are allowed to share, and to look at privacy settings in the vehicle's software. For the rest of the auto industry, it is a warning that data collected for a feature can quickly become a product of its own, and that regulators are watching.