WASHINGTON — The Federal Trade Commission finalized an order Wednesday against General Motors Co. that will ban the company from disclosing consumers’ geolocation and driver behavior data to consumer reporting agencies for five years.

The agency said in a news release that GM "collected, used, and sold consumers’ precise geolocation data and driving behavior data from millions of vehicles without adequately notifying consumers and obtaining their affirmative consent."

The release added that the enforcement action was appropriate given the Detroit-based automaker's "egregious betrayal of consumers’ trust."

GM responded in a statement from spokesperson Charlotte McCoy: “The Federal Trade Commission has formally approved the agreement reached last year with General Motors to address concerns. As vehicle connectivity becomes increasingly integral to the driving experience, GM remains committed to protecting customer privacy, maintaining trust, and ensuring customers have a clear understanding of our practices.”

McCoy noted that the settlement includes no financial penalty.

Federal regulators first proposed the order in the final days of the Biden administration. The FTC alleged in a complaint that GM used a "misleading enrollment process" to get consumers to sign up for its OnStar connected safety service and OnStar Smart Driver feature, which tracked driver habits. The company also, according to the FTC, failed to clearly disclose that it collected and sold consumer data gathered via Smart Driver.

"GM monitored and sold people’s precise geolocation data and driver behavior information, sometimes as often as every three seconds,” said former FTC Chair Lina Khan in January 2025. “With this action, the FTC is safeguarding Americans’ privacy and protecting people from unchecked surveillance.”

The final order will span 20 years. In addition to the data sales ban, it also requires GM to:

—Get affirmative consent for future collection, use and sharing of consumer data;

—Create a way for all U.S. consumers to request a copy of their data and seek its deletion;

—Give consumers the ability to disable the collection of precise geolocation data from their vehicles if their vehicle has the necessary technology; and

—Provide a way for consumers to opt out of the collection of geolocation and driver behavior data, with some limited exceptions.

The FTC voted 2-0 to approve the final order. The body is designed to have five commissioners, but Trump controversially fired two Democratic members last year. Another Republican commissioner recently left to serve as interim U.S. Attorney for Utah. Both current members, Andrew Ferguson and Mark Meador, are Republicans.

GM discontinued its OnStar Smart Driver service in April 2024 in the wake of a New York Times report about the company selling driver information to data brokers, which in turn provided data to insurance companies.

"G.M. established the Smart Driver program to promote safer driving for the benefit of customers who choose to participate,” company spokesperson Brandee Barker told the newspaper. “Based on customer feedback, we’ve decided to discontinue the Smart Driver product across all G.M. vehicles and unenroll all customers. This process will begin over the next few months.”

CEO Mary Barra later addressed the scandal in an interview with The Detroit News.

“We take our customers' data security and privacy very, very seriously,” she said in May 2024. “We're going to work hard to be very transparent and be very privacy-focused with our consumers, and (we) learned a lot of lessons in this, and we'll get better.”

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