A two-year legal battle between General Motors and California prosecutors, led by Attorney General Rob Bonta, over the alleged misuse of customer driving data has ended, with GM agreeing to pay $12.75 million in penalties.

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In a press release announcing the settlementThe AG alleges that GM sold “the names, contact information, geolocation data, and driving behavior data of hundreds of thousands of Californians” to data brokers, including Verisk Analytics and LexisNexis Risk Solutions. And, as the statement points out, “if you know the precise location of a person’s car, then you know an enormous amount of personal and sensitive information about that person: their home, their job, their children’s school, their place of worship.” »

The original facts of the case were discovered by The New York Times in 2024, the focus was on whether insurance companies were using this driving data to charge certain customers higher insurance rates. But the attorney general’s investigation concluded that “California drivers were not directly affected by GM’s data sales” because under California’s strict insurance laws, “insurers are prohibited from using driving data to set insurance rates.”

In addition to the $12.75 million settlement, GM agreed to stop selling driving data to consumer reporting agencies for five years, delete all current driving data within 180 days (unless expressly authorized by the driver to retain the data), and develop and maintain its own privacy program to evaluate its data collection practices and mitigate the risk of a data breach.

While the settlement is definitely a victory for consumer privacy, you shouldn’t feel too bad for GM just yet. By the attorney general’s own calculations, GM made about $20 million from selling its OnStar data, so even with the hefty settlement, they still make a tidy profit.