Your car has been grading your driving and selling the report card

For a long time, careful drivers had a deal they could count on. Keep a clean record, skip the claims, and your insurance stayed reasonable. Your driving was judged on results. Did you crash? Did you get tickets? Did you cost the company money? If the answer was no, you were rewarded.

That deal got rewritten, and most people never got the memo. A lot of newer cars now keep a running log of how you drive (every hard brake, every fast start, every late-night trip). In case after case that log has been handed to insurance companies before the driver ever filed a claim. The scorecard grew a second page, and this one grades how you behave behind the wheel, moment to moment, then sells the result.

About 90% of new cars on the road collect information on how the person behind the wheel drives, according to Telemetry, an automotive advisory firm. Not all of it reaches insurers, and some drivers signed up on purpose for programs that promise a discount. But a good share of this happened to people who had no idea it was happening at all.

I went to check my own car

When I started reading about this, my first thought was the same one you are probably having: is my car doing this?

I drive a 2019 Prius. I assumed the worst. Then I looked, which is something I had never done. As it turns out, the regular 2019 Prius mostly predates the always-connected setup that makes this possible. Toyota's built-in data module was standard on the fancier Limited trim and on the Prius Prime that year, but not on the base models. So my particular car is probably not in this story.

That digging is the frustrating part. Pinning down whether one ordinary car phones home took more effort than it should have, and the best I landed on was "probably not." If it is that murky for a single Prius, it is murky for almost everyone. The good news is that you can check, and the steps are at the bottom of this piece.

How the safety features were co-opted

Nobody sold you a tracker. They sold you a guardian angel.

The features that made this possible arrived dressed as safety and convenience: automatic crash notification, stolen-vehicle recovery, the app that finds your car in a parking lot. To turn those on, you agreed to some terms. Buried in those terms, in several documented cases, was permission to collect how you drive and pass it along.

General Motors sold driving data to two data brokers, Verisk and LexisNexis, over a span of years that ended in 2024. The records were tied to your car's VIN and included things like hard braking, fast acceleration, and how often you crossed 80 miles per hour. Former FTC chair Lina Khan said GM was tracking some location data as often as every three seconds.

LexisNexis and Verisk already keep files on your accidents and claims. They write the reports an insurer pulls before it quotes you. Driving behavior just got added to the pile. When your rate went up at renewal with no clear reason, this was sometimes why, and you would only find out by going digging.

The car industry's trade group has a defense. They say connected data keeps cars working and drivers safe, that it powers crash response and recall notices. That it is not the same as spying. Some of that is fair. The problem is what happened next to the data once it left the car.

Why people are angry

Consider what the automakers got paid for your data. According to a 2024 investigation by Senators Ron Wyden and Ed Markey, Honda shared data from about 97,000 cars with Verisk and was paid $25,920. That comes out to roughly 26 cents per car. Hyundai shared data from about 1.7 million cars and collected a little over a million dollars, around 61 cents per car.

So the company that sold you a $30,000 car made a quarter selling a year of your driving. The driver could pay hundreds of dollars more for insurance. One Florida driver, in a lawsuit against GM, said that after his driving data showed up in a report he never knew existed, he was turned down by seven insurers and his rate nearly doubled. Another driver, who is suing Toyota and Progressive, says his premium climbed from under $300 a month to over $400 at renewal, even though he had not had a ticket in almost a decade.

Nobody destroyed value in that exchange. They relocated it. A few cents went to the car company, the broker took a cut, and the cost landed on you.

Whether the scores are even fair

Set aside how the data was taken for a second. There is a fairer question underneath: does any of this actually measure good driving?

A hard brake can mean you are reckless. It can also mean someone pulled out in front of you and you stopped in time, which is the system working as intended. The data is precise, but precise is not the same as fair. In a J.D. Power survey, only about 4 in 10 drivers in these programs said the data their insurer collected was always accurate.

The discounts are smaller than they sound, too. When Maryland's insurance regulator audited real telematics policies (the kind that set your rate from tracked driving) in 2025, about 31% of drivers saw a decrease, about 24% actually paid more, and the rest saw no change. Consumer Reports found the typical saver banked around $120 a year. Drivers over 70 saved the least, around $93. The people most likely to trust that decades of clean driving will protect them are getting the smallest break and the most scrutiny.

What the regulators did, and did not, do

This drew enough attention that regulators moved. The FTC reached a settlement with GM in early 2026 that bars the company from sharing this data with reporting agencies for five years and requires real consent going forward. There was no fine, and GM said it had stopped selling the data a year earlier. California's attorney general got $12.75 million out of GM in a separate settlement, the largest of its kind under that state's privacy law. California's privacy agency also fined Honda and Ford, largely over how hard they made it to opt out.

None of it made collection illegal, and none of it covered the whole industry. There is still no federal law on this. Verisk got out of the business, but the machinery is mostly still standing.

What you can do about it

You have more power here than it feels like, and most of it is free.

Pull your own file. Under federal law you can ask these brokers for the report they keep on you, at no cost. Start with LexisNexis at consumer.risk.lexisnexis.com and request your consumer disclosure report. If there is driving data on you, it should be in there. I tried this myself while writing. I filled out the form, asked for my report, and asked them to delete what they hold. Twice I got the same answer back: an internal system error, please try again later. So the company that had no trouble gathering this data could not manage to hand me mine. If it stalls on you too, keep at it. The right to see your file is real even on a day the website is not.

Turn it off at the source. Most automakers now have a privacy page where you can opt out and ask them to delete what they have. Know the tradeoff before you do: switching off connected services can also switch off crash notification, roadside assistance, and stolen-vehicle help. That is a real decision, and it is yours to make.

If you have ever wondered how much your phone, your TV, and your video doorbell already know about where you are, the car is the newest and nosiest member of that club. (We covered a smaller cousin of this problem: the location hidden in your photos.) What sets the car apart is that it knows exactly where you go, and it is wired straight into a product that charges you money.

If you are in Oregon

Oregon changed the rules this year, and you should know what you have. As of January 1, 2026, it is illegal to sell precise location data about you (the kind that can place you within about a third of a mile). Car makers are now covered by the state privacy law no matter how big they are. So you can tell them not to sell or share your data. Businesses now have to honor a single browser signal, a "universal opt-out" that says do not sell my data. You can set it once and be done with it.

This is real and useful, but it also arrived years after a lot of the data was already collected, sold, and baked into somebody's pricing model. You can stop it from here on out, but what already went out the door is gone. Enforcement runs through the state attorney general, where you can file a complaint, though this particular law does not let you sue the car company yourself.

That is the state of it. Your car has spent years grading how you drive, and most drivers never saw the report card. So before you go look, a question worth answering honestly: do you think you would have earned a safe-driver discount, or be paying more? Most people are sure they know. The audited numbers say it is closer to a coin flip.

Either way, go find out what your car has been tattling to your insurer.

Sources

CNN on automakers selling driving data to insurers, including the 90% figure and the Progressive renewal case.

The FTC on its case against GM and OnStar, including the every-three-seconds detail.

EFF on the Wyden and Markey letter and the per-car payment figures.

CalMatters on California's $12.75 million settlement with GM.

Insurance Journal on Maryland's audit of telematics premium outcomes.

Consumer Reports on what telematics actually saves drivers.

The Oregon Department of Justice on the state's 2026 privacy rules and the universal opt-out.