Montana’s attorney general has filed suit against General Motors and its OnStar subsidiary, alleging the pair harvested driving behaviour from 14 million customers and sold it on.
The complaint, lodged on October 16 in Lewis and Clark County, argues that hardware fitted from 2015 onward logged speed, seat belt use, hard braking and acceleration, and GPS position. That material then moved to data brokers, who passed it to insurers that raised premiums or denied cover.
The state’s case turns on the enrolment screen rather than the sensor. It describes a deliberately confusing flow that signed drivers into the Smart Driver programme and calls the result a scheme to convert the car into a monitoring device.
GM said it is reviewing the filing and that Smart Driver was discontinued in 2024. The company already accepted a January 2026 US Federal Trade Commission order barring it from sharing driver data with consumer reporting agencies for five years.
This is not the first state action. Texas sued over the same programme in 2024. Insurers have understood the value of the data for years, and regulators are now testing who owns it.
