Texas has sued General Motors for what it said is a years-long scheme to collect and sell drivers' data to third parties - including insurance companies - without their knowledge or consent., filed yesterday in Texas state court, accuses both GM and its OnStar subsidiary of using telematics technology installed in most of its model year 2015 and later vehicles to transmit detailed driving data each time a vehicle is used.
The lawsuit alleges that more than 16 million GM customers had their data sold to third parties without their knowledge or consent, with 1.8 million of them residing in Texas, according to the petition. GM, meanwhile, allegedly made out handsomely from the scheme. Texas alleges the sale of data to analytics companies resulted in"millions in lump sum payments," royalty payments for the sale of licensed data to insurance companies and additional kickbacks if GM sold more than an unspecified amount of new vehicle data to telematics analytics companies per year.