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States need to have and use data privacy laws to bring privacy violations to light and hold companies accountable for them. So, we were glad to see that the Texas Attorney General’s Office has filed its first lawsuit under Texas Data Privacy and Security Act (TDPSA) to take the Allstate Corporation to task for sharing driver location and other driving data without telling customers.

In its complaint, the attorney general’s office alleges that Allstate and a number of its subsidiaries (some of which go by the name “Arity”) “conspired to secretly collect and sell ‘trillions of miles’ of consumers’ ‘driving behavior’ data from mobile devices, in-car devices, and vehicles.” (The defendant companies are also accused of violating Texas’ data broker law and its insurance law prohibiting unfair and deceptive practices.)

On the privacy front, the complaint says the defendant companies created a software development kit (SDK), which is basically a set of tools that developers can create to integrate functions into an app. In this case, the Texas Attorney General says that Allstate and Arity specifically designed this toolkit to scrape location data. They then allegedly paid third parties, such as the app Life360, to embed it in their apps. The complaint also alleges that Allstate and Arity chose to promote their SDK to third-party apps that already required the use of location date, specifically so that people wouldn’t be alerted to the additional collection.

That’s a dirty trick. Data that you can pull from cars is often highly sensitive, as we have raised repeatedly. Everyone should know when that information's being collected and where it's going.

More state regulators should follow suit and use the privacy laws on their books.

The Texas Attorney General’s office estimates that 45 million Americans, including those in Texas, unwittingly downloaded this software that collected their information, including location information, without notice or consent. This violates Texas’ privacy law, which went into effect in July 2024 and requires companies to provide a reasonably accessible notice to a privacy policy, conspicuous notice that they’re selling or processing sensitive data for targeting advertising, and to obtain consumer consent to process sensitive data.

This is a low bar, and the companies named in this complaint still allegedly failed to clear it. As law firm Husch Blackwell pointed out in its write-up of the case, all Arity had to do, for example, to fulfill one of the notice obligations under the TDPSA was to put up a line on their website saying, “NOTICE: We may sell your sensitive personal data.”

In fact, Texas’s privacy law does not meet the minimum of what we’d consider a strong privacy law. For example, the Texas Attorney General is the only one who can file a lawsuit under its states privacy law. But we advocate for provisions that make sure that everyone, not only state attorneys general, can file suits to make sure that all companies respect our privacy.

Texas’ privacy law also has a “right to cure”—essentially a 30-day period in which a company can “fix” a privacy violation and duck a Texas enforcement action. EFF opposes rights to cure, because they essentially give companies a “get-out-jail-free” card when caught violating privacy law. In this case, Arity was notified and given the chance to show it had cured the violation. It just didn’t.

According the complaint, Arity apparently failed to take even basic steps that would have spared it from this enforcement action. Other companies violating our privacy may be more adept at getting out of trouble, but they should be found and taken to task too. That’s why we advocate for strong privacy laws that do even more to protect consumers.

Nineteen states now have some version of a data privacy law. Enforcement has been a bit slower. California has brought a few enforcement actions since its privacy law went into effect in 2020; Texas and New Hampshire are two states that have created dedicated data privacy units in their Attorney General offices, signaling they’re staffing up to enforce their laws. More state regulators should follow suit and use the privacy laws on their books. And more state legislators should enact and strengthen their laws to make sure companies are truly respecting our privacy.

Hayley Tsukayama

The FTC’s Ban on GM and OnStar Selling Driver Data Is a Good First Step

EFF update

2 months 2 weeks ago

The Federal Trade Commission announced a proposed settlement agreeing that General Motors and its subsidiary, OnStar, will be banned from selling geolocation and driver behavior data to credit agencies for five years. That’s good news for G.M. owners. Every car owner and driver deserves to be protected.

Last year, a New York Times investigation highlighted how G.M. was sharing information with insurance companies without clear knowledge from the driver. This resulted in people’s insurance premiums increasing, sometimes without them realizing why that was happening. This data sharing problem was common amongst many carmakers, not just G.M., but figuring out what your car was sharing was often a Sisyphean task, somehow managing to be more complicated than trying to learn similar details about apps or websites.

The FTC complaint zeroed in on how G.M. enrolled people in its OnStar connected vehicle service with a misleading process. OnStar was initially designed to help drivers in an emergency, but over time the service collected and shared more data that had nothing to do with emergency services. The result was people signing up for the service without realizing they were agreeing to share their location and driver behavior data with third parties, including insurance companies and consumer reporting agencies. The FTC also alleged that G.M. didn’t disclose who the data was shared with (insurance companies) and for what purposes (to deny or set rates). Asking car owners to choose between safety and privacy is a nasty tactic, and one that deserves to be stopped.

For the next five years, the settlement bans G.M. and OnStar from these sorts of privacy-invasive practices, making it so they cannot share driver data or geolocation to consumer reporting agencies, which gather and sell consumers’ credit and other information. They must also obtain opt-in consent to collect data, allow consumers to obtain and delete their data, and give car owners an option to disable the collection of location data and driving information.

These are all important, solid steps, and these sorts of rules should apply to all carmakers. With privacy-related options buried away in websites, apps, and infotainment systems, it is currently far too difficult to see what sort of data your car collects, and it is not always possible to opt out of data collection or sharing. In reality, no consumer knowingly agrees to let their carmaker sell their driving data to other companies.

All carmakers should be forced to protect their customers’ privacy, and they should have to do so for longer than just five years. The best way to ensure that would be through a comprehensive consumer data privacy legislation with strong data minimization rules and requirements for clear, opt-in consent. With a strong privacy law, all car makers—not just G.M.— would only have authority to collect, maintain, use, and disclose our data to provide a service that we asked for.

Thorin Klosowski