Your Car Is a Data Broker: How Automakers Quietly Sell Your Driving Habits

Modern vehicles harvest detailed behavioral data—speeding, night driving, location—and automakers sell it to brokers who build risk profiles for insurers. The practice drew federal attention this year when the FTC banned General Motors from selling customer data to reporting agencies and brokers for five years. GM had funneled data from its OnStar Smart Driver feature to LexisNexis and Verisk, and a 2024 New York Times investigation found some drivers saw their insurance rates climb without understanding why or realizing they had ever opted in. GM is far from alone: a 2023 Mozilla Foundation review judged every major automaker to have ‘horrible privacy and security,’ and Consumer Reports reached a similar conclusion, noting that nearly every carmaker in the U.S. shares driver behavior data. Cars are worse than phones here because collection is fragmented across the vehicle, connected-services plan, mobile app, and financing, making the controls nearly impossible for owners to navigate.

Policy responses so far miss the core problem. The House Republicans’ DRIVER Act would grant owners more access to their data but still permits automakers to collect and sell it, which privacy advocates reject—access and deletion rights shift the burden onto consumers rather than curbing over-collection at the source. A separate ‘Freedom Car’ concept floated by Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy would bar the government from mandating automated-driving or wireless-transmission capability, a requirement no one is actually proposing.

The underlying incentive is money: as long as the data economy rewards monetizing personal information, automakers have little reason to stop voluntarily. There’s clear consumer appetite for stripped-down, disconnected vehicles—reflected in interest in bare-bones concepts and Reddit efforts to catalog the shrinking list of non-connected new cars—but opt-outs remain buried in legalese, and meaningful federal limits on collection appear unlikely to pass anytime soon.