Texas Skips $220 Million GM Data Deal and Keeps Its Own Suit

General Motors agreed on October 29 to pay $220 million to settle claims from 35 states and the District of Columbia that it sold drivers’ data without their consent. Texas was not one of them. The state is pressing its own lawsuit against the automaker under Texas law, a case Attorney General Ken Paxton filed in Montgomery County in August 2024 that is still pending, Texas Standard reported Thursday.

Washington and Oregon led the multistate case, according to the Washington attorney general’s office. Under the settlement, GM must get drivers’ “affirmative express consent” before collecting or sharing their driving and location data, limit the driving data it collects, run a privacy program with outside assessments and train its dealers so customers are not enrolled without agreeing to it. “People bought a car, not a tracking device,” Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield said, as Insurance Journal reported. GM said the agreement “addresses Smart Driver, a product we ended in 2024,” according to TechCrunch.

The Texas suit makes the same core accusation and seeks more. Filed August 13, 2024, under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, it accuses GM and its OnStar subsidiary of collecting driving data from more than 14 million vehicles and selling “driving scores” for more than 1.8 million Texans to insurers, Insurance Journal reported at the time. It also accuses dealers of telling buyers that OnStar enrollment was mandatory. The state wants the data deleted and civil penalties of up to $10,000 per offense, according to The Record.

“Our investigation revealed that General Motors has engaged in egregious business practices that violated Texans’ privacy and broke the law,” Paxton said when he filed it, according to news coverage of the filing.

GM fought the case in a different court. In October 2025, Chief Judge Martin Glenn of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan ruled that today’s GM cannot be made to pay penalties under the Texas law for what the old General Motors did before its 2009 bankruptcy, and he ordered Texas to strike those allegations before going forward. “New GM is not liable for the bad acts of Old GM in the context of civil penalties under the DTPA,” he wrote. The claims about the company’s conduct since 2009 survived.

The federal government has acted separately. In January 2026, the Federal Trade Commission finalized an order barring GM for five years from sharing drivers’ location or driving behavior data with consumer reporting agencies, and requiring consent for 20 years. The FTC’s order includes no payment.

The Texas case now passes to a new attorney general. Paxton leaves office in January, and Attorney General-elect Nathan Johnson will decide whether Texas keeps litigating under its own consumer law or settles on terms of its own. The attorney general’s office has not said publicly why Texas stayed out of the multistate deal.