Your Car Is Watching You, and It May Be Selling Your Driving to Insurers
Your Car Is Watching You, and It May Be Selling Your Driving to Insurers
Your car knows how hard you brake, how fast you take corners, how late at night you drive, and everywhere you go. A modern connected vehicle is a rolling sensor package. The unsettling part is not just that it collects all of this. It is where some of that data has been going: to data brokers, and from there to your insurance company.
How your driving became a product
Many newer cars come with connected services that log detailed driving behavior, things like hard braking, rapid acceleration, speeding, trip times, and precise location. Marketed as safety or maintenance features, these programs can quietly double as a data pipeline. The information gets packaged and handed to brokers who build driver risk scores, and those scores get sold to insurers who use them to set your premium.
The case that blew it open
In 2024, a New York Times investigation revealed that General Motors had been collecting driving data through its OnStar Smart Driver feature and sharing it with two of the auto industry's biggest data brokers, LexisNexis Risk Solutions and Verisk Analytics. One driver featured in the report saw his premium jump after data on his habits reached insurers, despite never having an accident, and said he had no idea any of it was being shared.
It cost them: GM cut ties with both brokers in March 2024, and in May 2026 it agreed to a 12.75 million dollar settlement with California over the practice, the largest penalty under that state's privacy law to date. Investigators found GM had sold the names, contact details, location, and driving behavior of hundreds of thousands of drivers, making roughly 20 million dollars nationwide.
And GM was not alone. The brokers' programs pull "consumer-approved" driving data from millions of vehicles across multiple automakers. The consent, of course, was usually buried in paperwork at the dealership or in an app prompt nobody reads closely.
What you can do, and what it will not fix
Start by opening your car's connected-services app and turning off any driving-score or telematics sharing. Decline data collection when the dealership or app asks. You can also request your consumer file from the big driving-data brokers to see what they hold on you, and ask them to remove it. Our free privacy tools page points to more options.
Here is the honest limit. Switching this off protects you going forward, but it does nothing about the data already collected and sold, and nothing about the much larger profile of your name, addresses, phone numbers, and relatives that data brokers and people-search sites have built from public records. That exposure is already live, and it sits entirely outside your car.
See what is already exposed about you
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Clawing back what is already out there is the hard part, and it is where most people give up. Consumer Reports found that automated and do-it-yourself removal cleared only about 27 percent of listings, while trained people working by hand reached around 70 percent. The gap is the number of sites and the discipline to keep returning. That is why we built Privoria around real people.
Frequently asked questions
Does every car sell driving data?
Not every one, but many connected cars collect it, and several automakers have shared it with insurance-industry brokers. Check your vehicle's app and privacy settings to see what is enabled.
How would this affect my insurance?
Brokers turn your driving behavior into a risk score that insurers can use to raise or lower your premium. Frequent hard braking or late-night driving can push it up.
Can I see what they have collected?
You can request a consumer disclosure report from the major driving-data brokers, which shows whether your behavior has been shared, and ask them to delete it.
Your car is only one leak of many
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