The freedom capsule
For a century the automobile has been the American machine of freedom. It is in the founding mythology of the country's second act — the open road, the getaway, the frontier you could reach on a full tank. It is the place teenagers go to be unwatched, the space a person sings badly and cries privately and works out their life at seventy miles an hour. The car meant you could leave — and leaving without anyone knowing where you went is one of the oldest forms of liberty there is.
That capsule is now wired. Roughly nine in ten new vehicles sold are "connected" — fitted with a cellular modem that transmits continuously, even parked, even with no subscription active. The modern car runs on the order of a hundred data points and can generate gigabytes an hour: location, speed, braking, acceleration, seatbelt status, and, increasingly, the cabin itself — microphones, cameras, voiceprints. The symbol of American freedom has quietly become the richest single informant most Americans own, and on the Fourth of July it is worth asking who it reports to.
The answer, it turns out, is a data broker.
The Smart Driver trap
Here is what General Motors did, as the Federal Trade Commission laid it out. GM offered an OnStar feature called "Smart Driver," pitched as a gamified way to improve your own driving — a friendly score, a nudge toward safer habits. What the enrollment did not make clear is that signing up meant GM would log your precise geolocation as often as every three seconds, along with detailed "driving events" — hard braking, rapid acceleration, speeds over eighty, seatbelt use, even which radio stations you listened to — and sell that stream to the data brokers LexisNexis and Verisk. The FTC found the consent was manufactured: the agreement to enroll in Smart Driver was bundled with consent to safety and maintenance alerts, so that a driver who wanted the crash-detection service could be swept into the surveillance product without ever understanding the trade.
This is the mechanism of the whole scandal, and it is worth naming precisely, because it is the trick the entire industry runs: the safety feature is the bait, and the broker pipeline is the hook, and the two are deliberately welded together so that "you wanted the airbag to call for help" can be stretched into "so you agreed to be sold." The story broke in March 2024 when the New York Times reporter Kashmir Hill discovered that drivers were being enrolled in Smart Driver — sometimes, as with her own new Chevy Bolt, without any memory of consenting — and that insurers were quietly using the resulting files to raise rates. GM ended the practice eleven days later. But by then the data had been flowing to brokers for years.
What the record reveals
To understand why this is not "a company sold some data" but something closer to a betrayal, you have to see what a driving record actually is. It is not a log of trips. It is, in the Supreme Court's own words from Carpenter v. United States, a map of "the privacies of life" — because a comprehensive record of your movements reveals "your familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations." Where you sleep. Where you worship. The clinic you drive to across a state line, the union hall, the divorce lawyer, the lover's house at 1 a.m., the support meeting you tell no one about. Carpenter concerned 127 days of coarse cell-tower data and the Court called it an intimate window into a life. A connected car generates a far denser record — every three seconds, tied to a single named owner — and then it does something the phone never did: it judges you.
Because the "driving behavior" the brokers package is not just where you went; it is a moral and financial score. Verisk's product was literally called the "Driving Behavior Data History Report" — a credit report for how you drive — and insurers used it, in the FTC's words, "for unexpected purposes including denying or canceling insurance, increasing insurance premiums." Temeika Clay of Henry County, Georgia, is the human face of it: her premium jumped eighty percent after GM shared 603 driving-activity entries from her Camaro, for a program she and her husband were enrolled in without opting into. "You think safety, if it gets stolen," she told a local reporter. "Never did I imagine it would be spying on us."
And the scoring discriminates. The factor drivers reject most, surveys find, is time of day — because pricing on when you drive punishes the night-shift and low-wage workers who have no say over their schedules, disproportionately Black and Latino, making "safe driving" a quiet proxy for race. Disability advocates note the same trap: a system tuned to "typical" driving flags the frequent long trips to distant specialists that a disabled person's life requires as "risky." The car doesn't just watch. It sorts.
Not one bad actor
It would be comforting to treat GM as a rogue, but the record says the opposite: GM is simply the first one caught. When the Mozilla Foundation reviewed twenty-five car brands against a basic privacy standard, it failed all twenty-five — the first time any product category had swept the board — and called cars "the official worst category of products for privacy that we have ever reviewed." Eighty-four percent said they could share your data; three-quarters reserved the right to sell it; more than half said they would hand it to police or governments on an informal request, no warrant required; and exactly two of the twenty-five let you delete it. The categories some brands claim the right to collect read like satire: Nissan's policy listed "sexual activity," Kia's listed "sex life," and six companies claimed the right to gather "genetic information," alongside immigration status, race, and facial expressions.
The enforcement record confirms it is systemic. Honda paid a $632,500 fine to California's privacy regulator in March 2025 over the same kind of connected-car data practices. Texas sued GM in 2024 on behalf of 1.8 million drivers, then widened its probe to Ford, Hyundai, Toyota, and Stellantis, and sued the insurance-analytics firm Arity over what it called "the world's largest driving behavior database" — some forty-five million people. Hyundai alone handed data from 1.7 million cars to Verisk and was paid more than a million dollars for it. The pipeline — automaker to broker to insurer — is not a GM feature. It is the business model of the connected car, and the connected car is the only kind now sold.
The subpoena in the glovebox
There is a second recipient of what your car sees, and it does not always need a judge. When Senators Ron Wyden and Ed Markey pressed the automakers in 2024, eight major brands — Toyota, Nissan, Subaru, Volkswagen, BMW, Mazda, Mercedes-Benz, and Kia — admitted they would hand a driver's location data to a government agency on a mere subpoena, which a prosecutor can issue without a warrant and without a judge ever seeing it. Only a handful said they required a warrant, and only Tesla said it notified the owner. Some retain the data for as long as fifteen years. This broke the industry's own written promise: a set of "Consumer Privacy Principles" the automakers signed in 2014 pledging to require a warrant.
The timing sharpens the stakes. In Chatrie v. United States, decided June 29 of this year, the Supreme Court held that obtaining a person's location data is a Fourth Amendment search — a real extension of Carpenter. But the ruling constrains what the government may demand; it says nothing about an automaker that volunteers your data, or a broker that sells it, and it does not mention cars at all. That is the seam. The Constitution is beginning to guard the front door — the warrant — while the car quietly runs a copy of everywhere you've been out the back, to a broker who will sell it to anyone, including, on a subpoena, the state. Family lawyers now treat telematics as discoverable evidence in divorce and custody fights; because manufacturer-installed tracking used "with the owner's consent" falls outside most anti-stalking laws, an abusive ex who holds the car's title can lawfully pull the record of where their partner has been.
The steelman, honestly
The case for the connected car is real, and it must be met at full strength, because the car really can save your life. Automatic crash notification — the system that calls for help when you're unconscious after a wreck — is estimated by federal safety researchers to cut roadway fatalities by between one and a half and three and a half percent; Europe has mandated it on every new car since 2018. OnStar fields roughly a thousand stolen-vehicle requests a month and recovers cars that would otherwise vanish. And usage-based insurance, when a driver knowingly opts in, genuinely can reward the safe and the low-mileage — about one in four American drivers now enrolls for the discount, and research finds the feedback even makes people brake less harshly. A live data connection to your car is not inherently sinister. It is, in these uses, a genuine good.
Concede all of it, and the informant thesis stands, for one decisive reason: every one of those benefits is severable from the sale. Crash detection, the ambulance call, stolen-vehicle recovery, over-the-air security patches — all require your car to talk to the manufacturer's own servers. Not one of them requires a driving-behavior report to be built and sold to LexisNexis or Verisk. The industry welded the two together on purpose, so that the thing you needed would drag along the thing they could sell. And the proof that they are severable is that the FTC's order pries them apart by force: GM must now obtain separate consent for each distinct feature, and — the key line — it may "not place limits on withholding or withdrawing consent, such as by degrading the quality or functioning of a product or service as a penalty." In plain English: you are entitled to keep the airbag-crash-call and refuse the insurer pipeline, and the company is forbidden from bricking your safety features to punish you for saying no. As for "you consented" — a regulator examined that consent and found it a deception. Consent bundled into a necessity, buried in a policy you cannot negotiate, on a product with no un-surveilled alternative, is not a market choice. It is a formality, and the FTC said so.
There is no un-connected car
And that is why the reflex this publication is built on — reach for a tool, minimize your own exposure — fails here almost completely. You cannot opt out in any meaningful way. The settings are buried; the "connected services" that carry the safety features are bundled with the tracking; and the automakers admit in writing that opting out degrades the car — Stellantis deactivates its safety service, Tesla warns of "reduced functionality, serious damage, or inoperability." The only genuine kill switch is to physically disconnect the cellular modem, which voids your warranty and disables the very crash-detection that might save you. There is no VPN for a car, no encryption you can bolt onto a vehicle whose manufacturer holds the keys, and — the hard part — no un-connected new car left on the lot to buy instead. Ninety percent of the market transmits, and the other ten is used and aging out.
So, exactly as with the license-plate dragnet, the counter cannot be personal. It has to be legal. And the news, on this Fourth of July, is that the legal counter is landing.
The law caught the car
The same regulators the tech-privacy world usually watches lose finally won one. In January the FTC finalized a twenty-year order against GM and OnStar: a five-year ban on selling geolocation and driver-behavior data to consumer-reporting agencies, a twenty-year requirement to get affirmative, express, feature-by-feature consent, and a mandate to let drivers see and delete their data. In May, California's attorney general reached a $12.75 million settlement with GM — the largest privacy penalty in the state's history, and the first the state has ever built on the principle of data minimization: the idea that a company may not collect and keep more than it actually needs. Texas is still suing. Verisk, one of the two brokers, shut down its automaker-fed driving-behavior product entirely.
Be honest about the limits, because they are real and they matter. The FTC order carried no fine — its force is the consent regime, not a penalty, and GM's total take from the whole scheme was only about twenty million dollars, a rounding error for a company its size. It reached one automaker, after a journalist exposed it, and left the scoring models and the subpoena pipeline of the other two dozen brands standing. This is a dent, not a demolition.
But look at how it happened, because it is the same hopeful pattern this series keeps finding at the civic layer. The GM order was opened under one FTC and finalized under the next — on a two-to-nothing vote by two Republican commissioners. Surveillance of ordinary Americans in their own cars turned out to be the rare thing a divided government could still agree was too far. Accountability for the informant in the driveway survived an administration change, which is not something you can say about most privacy fights. The law is slow, and it is partial, and it caught exactly one car. But it caught it — and it drew, for the first time, the line that matters: your car may talk to its maker to save your life, and it may not sell the story of your life to anyone who asks.
Drive free
The open road was always a little bit of a lie — you were never as free as the ad made you feel — but the part that was true, the part worth keeping, is that you could go somewhere and be, for an hour, accountable to no one. That is the specific freedom the connected car quietly repealed: not the freedom to move, but the freedom to move unobserved, to leave without leaving a record, to drive to a place you would rather no one knew you went. The car became the thing that remembers, and judges, and tells.
You cannot fix that with a gadget, and you should stop being told you can. There is no privacy setting that unmakes a business model. What fixed it, as far as it has been fixed, was a regulator with subpoena power and a state attorney general willing to call collecting-more-than-you-need a violation — the boring, essential machinery of the law, doing the one thing no personal technology can. The right to own a car that can save your life without informing on you is not a feature you configure. It is a rule someone has to write and enforce, and this year, for the first time, someone did.
On the Fourth of July, in a country that made the automobile its icon of liberty, that is the fight worth naming and the small victory worth marking. The informant is in the driveway. But the law, for once, is in the garage with it — and it just took away the keys to your data.
URnetwork builds privacy-preserving, censorship-resistant transport for the internet, on the principle that the data a system never collects is the data that can never be sold, subpoenaed, or leaked. It is honest about its reach: it cannot re-engineer a car whose manufacturer holds the modem and the keys, and no user-side tool can. That is the lesson of this edition — some surveillance lives inside the products we own, where the only counter is the law that forbids the collection and the enforcement that makes it stick. Data minimization is not a nice-to-have; it is the whole game, and the GM order is what it looks like when a regulator finally treats it that way.
https://ur.io