The Federal Trade Commission stated on Thursday that it had reached a settlement with General Motors that may ban the automaker from offering drivers’ habits and geolocation knowledge to client reporting companies. The ban will final for 5 years.
The New York Times reported final yr that G.M. was accumulating knowledge about individuals’s driving habits, together with how typically they sped or drove at evening, and promoting it to knowledge brokers who generated threat profiles for insurance coverage firms. Some drivers reported that their auto insurance coverage charges elevated in consequence.
“G.M. monitored and offered individuals’s exact geolocation knowledge and driver habits info, generally as typically as each three seconds,” Lina M. Khan, chair of the F.T.C. “With this motion, the F.T.C. is safeguarding Americans’ privateness and defending individuals from unchecked surveillance.”
The F.T.C. opened an investigation and decided that G.M. had collected and offered knowledge from tens of millions of autos “with out adequately notifying shoppers and acquiring their affirmative consent.” Drivers who signed up for OnStar Connected Services and activated a function known as Smart Driver had been topic to the information assortment. But federal regulators stated that the enrollment course of was so complicated, many shoppers didn’t understand that that they had signed up for it.
“G.M. failed to obviously speak in confidence to shoppers the kinds of info it collected by means of its Smart Driver function, together with that their geolocation and driving habits knowledge — akin to each occasion of laborious braking, late evening driving and dashing — can be offered to client reporting companies,” the F.T.C. stated in an announcement. “These client reporting companies used the delicate info G.M. offered to compile credit score reviews on shoppers, which had been utilized by insurance coverage firms to disclaim insurance coverage and set charges.”
G.M. didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
In the weeks after The Times’s investigation, G.M. stopped sharing details about drivers with two knowledge brokers, LexisNexis Risk Solutions and Verisk, that labored with the insurance coverage business. The five-year ban prohibits G.M. from sharing details about particular person drivers, however it will possibly nonetheless share nameless knowledge about individuals’s driving with third events, akin to street security researchers.
Ms. Khan, who policed company knowledge assortment and the tech business throughout her time main the F.T.C., will likely be changed as chair when the Trump administration takes over subsequent week.
Under the settlement settlement, G.M. should make it simpler for drivers to show off monitoring of their automobile’s location, and make it attainable for them to realize entry to and delete the information the automaker has collected about their driving.