General Motors (GM) reached a settlement agreement with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) which bans the company from disclosing consumers’ sensitive geolocation and driver behavior data to consumer reporting agencies for five years. 

The order is the first action the FTC plans to take in relation to connected vehicle data, according to a press release. The order follows U.S. senators asking the FTC to investigate automakers’ alleged disclosure of driving data from millions of American consumer vehicles to data brokers. 

Allegations of the disclosures were first reported in a New York Times investigation last year. 

The FTC filed a complaint alleging that GM used a misleading enrollment process to get consumers to sign up for its OnStar connected vehicle service and the OnStar Smart Driver feature. 

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

According to a GM news release, the company ended its Smart Driver program due to customer feedback last year. Customers were unenrolled and GM ended its relationships with LexisNexis and Verisk, the release says. The company also says it consolidated its many U.S. privacy statements into a single, simpler statement in an effort to raise the bar on privacy. 

Under the order, GM and Onstar, owned by GM, are required to obtain affirmative express consent from consumers prior to collecting connected vehicle data with some exceptions such as providing location data to emergency first responders, the FTC release says. 

The companies must create a way for all U.S. consumers to request a copy of their data and seek its deletion, the release says. The companies also must 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 order states that GM and Onstar will be required to provide records to the FTC for up to 20 years. This includes consumer consent records regarding data collection and use.

GM says consumers can exercise their privacy rights by visiting GM’s U.S. Consumer Privacy Request Form or by calling 1-866-MYPRIVACY (1-866-697-7482). 

In August, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed suit against General Motors and subsidiary OnStar for “false, deceptive, and misleading” business practices related to the alleged collection and sale of more than 1.8 million Texans’ private driving data to insurance companies.

Paxton announced earlier this week that his office has also filed suit against Allstate and its subsidiary, Arity, for unlawfully collecting, using, and selling data about the location and movement of Texans’ cell phones through “secretly embedded software in mobile apps.

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