GM just paid a record penalty for breaking California privacy law
GM sold driving data from hundreds of thousands of California drivers without consent and walked away with the largest CCPA fine ever, $12.75 million. The record penalty exposes how weak the state’s privacy law really is.
General Motors has agreed to pay California a record $12.75 million civil penalty for selling location and driving data collected from hundreds of thousands of state motorists through its OnStar system, allegedly without their informed consent.
The settlement, announced Friday, marks the largest fine imposed under the California Consumer Privacy Act since the 2018 law took effect. That statute was sold to voters as a bulwark against exactly this kind of corporate data grab, yet it took years and an investigation by the state attorney general’s office to produce this outcome.
Under the CCPA, companies must disclose what personal information they collect, sell, or share and give consumers the right to opt out. Prosecutors said GM’s practices around OnStar data violated those requirements, turning routine driving habits into a product sold to data brokers while drivers remained in the dark.
The size of the penalty is being touted as a victory for consumer protection. Yet when measured against the scale of modern data commerce, $12.75 million starts to look like the cost of doing business for a company the size of GM. The settlement does not require the automaker to admit wrongdoing, a common feature in these agreements that limits deterrence.
California’s privacy regime was supposed to force transparency and accountability. Instead it has produced a string of settlements that function more like licensing fees for surveillance. Drivers whose movements were tracked and monetized received no direct compensation, only the abstract satisfaction of watching the state extract another multimillion-dollar check.
The question now is whether this record fine will change corporate behavior or simply set a new benchmark for the next violation. California motorists keep feeding data into connected vehicles; regulators keep writing checks that never quite seem to balance the ledger.
Original reporting: CalMatters.
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