During the pandemic, I bought a car. It was the first time I had owned a car since 1999. Cars had really improved since the ‘90s. Cruise control. Carplay. Apps to control them from afar. Cars had become smartphones on wheels.

I’m a technology reporter who covers privacy. I know that smartphones spy on their users. What were cars doing?

I dug in and unearthed troubling practices. Among my discoveries was that General Motors was tracking individual drivers — including when and how long they drove, when they sped, hard-braked, or rapidly accelerated — and selling that information to the risk profiling industry. Drivers had no idea this was happening, and it was affecting how much they paid for insurance and even whether they could get it.

GM had been doing this for five years. Two weeks after my story came out, it stopped. This reporting led to class action lawsuits and government investigations. GM made around $25 million selling this data, according to one source I talked to. In a financial filing in 2026, the company said the fallout from collecting and selling this driver data without explicit consent has cost the company $500 million and counting.