General Motors has come under fire for enrolling drivers into the OnStar Smart Driver program without their consent, which tracks their driving habits and shares it with insurance companies, according to Jalopnik.
A New York Times reporter, who had first broke news of GM sharing drivers’ info with data brokers LexisNexis Risk Solutions and Verisk, recently found herself at the center of the problem.
Though GM said back in March that it ended its relationship with LexisNexis and Verisk, the reporter and her husband received reports from the two companies this month, with details on 203 trips her husband had taken since January, and a report from Verisk detailing 297 trips.
Though she had confirmed back in January that they were not enrolled in the Smart Driver program, her husband logged on to his online GM account, where it now said they were enrolled. Come to find out, she was enrolled by her dealer when buying her 2023 Chevy Bolt. That it initially said they weren’t enrolled is due to what GM calls a bug.
“That this happened to me, the rare consumer who reads privacy policies and is constantly on the lookout for creepy data collection, demonstrates what little hope there was for the typical car buyer,” she wrote in the Times.
Dealership customers are required to be shown a series of screens that they check “yes” or “no” on, but the reporter experienced a dealer signing off on them without her knowledge. Though a GM spokeswoman told her dealers are required to show these screens, the GM dealer in question said that his pay is docked if he fails to enroll drivers in OnStar.
“He said that was a mandate from G.M., which sends the dealership a report card each month tracking the percentage of sign-ups,” she writes in her New York Times report.
She is far from the only GM owner to experience this, having heard from many others since her initial reporting on GM’s data sharing practices. One driver described her insurance having gone up 50% as a result of GM sharing her data, and 10 federal lawsuits have been filed against GM in the past month by other drivers in the same situation as the Times reporter.
