Montana Attorney General Sues GM and OnStar Over Driving Data

Montana Attorney General Sues GM and OnStar Over Driving Data

Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen sued General Motors LLC and OnStar LLC on October 16, 2026 in Lewis and Clark County district court, alleging they deceptively enrolled drivers in data collection and sold the results to brokers who supplied insurers. The single count is consumer protection, not privacy.

Information last verified on November 2, 2026. This is a developing story; we update it as the record changes.

Status: This is a complaint, filed October 16, 2026. No court has ruled on the merits and nothing in it has been proved. We could not reach Montana's online court records on November 2, 2026, so we cannot confirm whether General Motors has answered, whether a judge has been assigned, or whether any motion is pending; treat the posture as unknown rather than quiet. Every description of GM's and OnStar's conduct below is an allegation by the State of Montana.

Jurisdiction scope: This article addresses one civil enforcement action by the State of Montana, in Montana state court, under the Montana Unfair Trade Practices and Consumer Protection Act, with reference to the separate federal FTC order and the separate multistate, California and Nebraska actions. It does not address private class actions against GM, and it does not state the consumer-protection law of any other state. For the standing rules on consumer data in Montana rather than this lawsuit, see Montana's rules on consumer data.

What Happened

On October 16, 2026 the State of Montana filed State of Montana v. General Motors LLC and OnStar LLC in the Montana First Judicial District Court, Lewis and Clark County. The clerk's electronic filing stamp on page 1 reads FILED 10/16/2026 and carries case number DV-25-2026-0000748-OC, which is the number we cite because the caption's own case-number box was left blank. The complaint pleads a single cause of action under the Montana Unfair Trade Practices and Consumer Protection Act of 1973, MCA 30-14-101 et seq., and demands a jury trial on all issues so triable. Attorney General Knudsen brings it on behalf of the State under MCA 30-14-111, and pleads venue in Lewis and Clark County because GM is not a Montana resident and keeps no principal place of business in the state, tracking the venue clause of MCA 30-14-111(3).

The defendants are General Motors LLC and OnStar LLC, both Delaware limited liability companies headquartered in Detroit, with OnStar pleaded as a wholly owned GM subsidiary. That party list is narrower than the FTC's: the Commission's order names a third respondent, General Motors Holdings LLC, which Montana does not sue.

The state's own announcement that day said the practices violated the Unfair Trade Practices and Consumer Protection Act, and that the attorney general is asking the court for a permanent injunction, civil fines, and destruction of all driving data including any held by a third party. In that release Knudsen said GM had engaged in deceptive practices by taking Montanans' driving data and selling it to other brokers without their permission, and that he would hold the company accountable for breaking the law. We summarize rather than quote him because the release did not load for us on November 2, 2026.

What the complaint alleges

At the dealership, according to the complaint, buyers and lessees were put through an onboarding process that "appeared to be required before taking ownership of their vehicle." GM presented more than 50 pages of disclosures about its OnStar products, the state alleges, without ever saying that GM would sell the driving data it collected. The state alleges dealership employees were incentivized, often by commission, to enroll customers, which it says likely enrolled many without their knowledge. A customer who tried to decline, the complaint alleges, was shown warning messages that several of the vehicle's safety features would be deactivated.

The scale pleaded is large. Paragraph 3 alleges the driving data GM collected and sold came from "over 14 million of its vehicles, many of which were bought, owned, and driven by Montanans in Montana," and lists 36 categories of it, running from GPS coordinates and vehicle speed to hard braking, hard acceleration, seat belt status and instances of driving above 80 miles per hour.

From there, the complaint traces the data outward. It alleges GM licensed the data to companies that assembled a telematics exchange and calculated a Driving Score, then licensed access to insurers. Verisk, under a 2015 agreement, Wejo, under a 2018 agreement, LexisNexis Risk Solutions, under a 2019 agreement, and Jacobs Engineering Group, under a contract dated January 3, 2024, are the named counterparties. The state alleges insurers could and did use these scores and data "to make decisions that impacted consumers, including monthly premium increases, dropped coverage, or coverage denials," and that the arrangements unlocked "millions in lump-sum payments, 'royalty payments' based on telematics exchange licenses sold to insurers, and annual guaranteed payments" tied to data from a threshold number of newly sold vehicles.

"GM turned a perennial symbol of American freedom and autonomy [the automobile] into Big Brother on wheels." Source: Complaint para. 1, State of Montana v. General Motors LLC and OnStar LLC (filed Oct. 16, 2026). The bracketed words replace the filing's own dashes.

The complaint also pleads GM's reaction to press scrutiny as evidence of knowledge. It alleges GM announced it would stop providing data to Verisk and LexisNexis Risk Solutions, announced it would discontinue Smart Driver, and ended the free Smart Driver program in April 2024, all after New York Times reporting in 2024, and says that "Defendants' immediate cessation of their unlawful conduct upon exposure by the New York Times further demonstrated their knowledge." Knowledge is not incidental here. It is the element the fine figure turns on, for reasons set out below.

Montana Is Not Among the 36 Settling Jurisdictions

Montana does not appear in either of the two documents that define who settled with GM.

On October 29, 2026 the Michigan attorney general announced a $220 million settlement with GM over the same subject matter. Her release names the coalition: Michigan plus 35 other jurisdictions, including the District of Columbia, which is 36 in all. Montana is not among them. The form of final judgment and consent decree posted with that release carries a footnote stating that the defendants are "simultaneously entering into similar judgments" with the attorneys general of the listed states, and that list does not include Montana either. A text search of the posted PDF returns no occurrence of the word Montana.

It is worth being precise about what those two documents establish. They show that Montana is not listed among the jurisdictions entering those judgments and not listed among the recipients of the money, which the decree divides among the participating states and pays to each plaintiff directly. They do not explain why, and we found no document in which Montana or GM describes the decision. We are not reporting that Montana was offered a place and refused, or the reverse. What the multistate judgments mean for a suit brought by a state that is not a party to them is a question for the Montana court, not something either document answers.

The sequence matters too. Montana filed on October 16, thirteen days before the multistate announcement, so its case was already on file when the coalition went public. Our separate report on what the 36 settling jurisdictions actually agreed to has those terms, including the November 30, 2026 effective date and the fact that none of the $220 million reaches individual drivers.

Nor is Montana an outlier. California announced its own settlement on May 8, 2026, and that one is finished: the Napa County Superior Court entered the stipulated Final Judgment and Permanent Injunction on May 12, 2026, and a court-approved amended judgment followed on June 30, 2026, in People of the State of California v. General Motors LLC and OnStar, LLC, No. 26CV001011. Its terms are $12.75 million in civil penalties, brought under California's privacy, false advertising and unfair competition laws, together with a requirement that GM stop selling driving data to any consumer reporting agency for five years. Nebraska went earlier still. On July 8, 2025 Nebraska Attorney General Mike Hilgers announced a suit against General Motors LLC and OnStar LLC in Lancaster County District Court, alleging deceptive and unconscionable practices under the Nebraska Consumer Protection Act and the Uniform Deceptive Trade Practices Act and seeking civil penalties, restitution and injunctive relief. Nebraska is also absent from the 36-jurisdiction coalition. We could not confirm the current posture of the Nebraska case, so treat it the same way as Montana's: filed, with status unverified.

For a Montana reader, the practical consequence is simple. The settlement headlines describe other states. Montana's case is separate, and the relief it asks for is not the relief the coalition accepted.

What the Law Actually Says

The rule Montana is invoking is one sentence long, and that is a large part of why the state chose it.

"Unfair methods of competition and unfair or deceptive acts or practices in the conduct of any trade or commerce are unlawful." Source: MCA 30-14-103, Montana Code Annotated 2025

Everything the state has to establish on liability sits inside that sentence: an unfair or deceptive act or practice, in the conduct of trade or commerce. Nothing in that section imposes a size threshold, requires a particular disclosure document, or conditions liability on a step a consumer took first.

The attorney general's authority comes from MCA 30-14-111. Subsection (1) lets the department sue in the name of the State for a temporary or permanent injunction when it has reason to believe a person has used a method, act or practice declared unlawful by 30-14-103 and the proceeding would be in the public interest, and it allows the department to bring the action "within 5 years on discovery of the method, act, or practice." Subsection (3) supplies the venue rule the complaint relies on for filing in Lewis and Clark County.

The money comes from MCA 30-14-142. Under subsection (2), in an action brought under 30-14-111, if the court finds that a person is willfully using or has willfully used a practice declared unlawful by 30-14-103, the department may petition the court and "recover on behalf of the state a civil fine of not more than $10,000 for each violation." Subsection (4) defines the trigger: a willful violation "occurs when the party committing the violation knew or should have known that the conduct was a violation of 30-14-103." That definition is why the complaint spends paragraphs on what GM knew and on how quickly it changed course after the 2024 press reporting. Subsection (1) separately fines violating an injunction up to $10,000 per violation, which is the provision that would matter after any injunction issued. Subsection (3) creates a criminal penalty of up to $5,000, a year's imprisonment, or both, for a fraudulent course of conduct; this filing is civil and its prayer does not request that. Alongside it, MCA 30-14-144(1) authorizes "an additional civil penalty not to exceed $10,000 for each violation" where the conduct is perpetrated against a vulnerable adult, but only if the court finds either that the defendant knew or should have known its conduct was directed at vulnerable adults or that the conduct caused one of five specific losses listed in the section. The complaint's prayer requests it.

One more provision links the state case to the federal one. MCA 30-14-104(1) directs that in construing 30-14-103, "due consideration and weight must be given to the interpretations of the federal trade commission and the federal courts relating to section 5(a)(1) of the Federal Trade Commission Act." The complaint invokes it and then points at the FTC's own GM order.

The FTC order, stated precisely

The FTC's order in the matter of General Motors LLC, General Motors Holdings LLC and OnStar, LLC was issued January 13, 2026 as Docket No. C-4828, and the Commission announced it on January 14 on a 2-0 vote. Its first operative provision says GM and OnStar "must not disclose Covered Driver Data to any person when that person is acting in the capacity of a Consumer Reporting Agency, for five years from the entry of this Order." Covered Driver Data is defined disjunctively: information that either is Location Data, or is one of a listed set of events linked or reasonably linkable to a United States consumer, together with the trip time and duration for those events. The listed events are certain radio listening data and hard braking, hard acceleration, hard cornering, crossing of a designated high-speed threshold, seat belt usage or late-night driving. The definition excludes vehicle build, trim, make, model and year data, and data de-identified after collection. The order runs 20 years and adds affirmative-express-consent, access, deletion and opt-out duties. The FTC's press release lists no monetary payment.

Two cautions, because this order is widely paraphrased loosely. The five-year restriction is about disclosure to entities acting as consumer reporting agencies; on the terms of that provision it is not a ban on every transfer of driver data to every broker or insurer. And the Montana complaint sets the FTC matter out in sequence: paragraph 90 dates the FTC's draft complaint to January 16, 2025, paragraph 91 describes the proposed consent order GM then agreed to, and paragraph 92 records that the FTC announced a finalized order on January 14, 2026. The order itself bears an issuance date of January 13, 2026. The order itself is final and bears its own issuance date.

Why this is not a Consumer Data Privacy Act case

Montana does have a modern privacy statute, the Consumer Data Privacy Act, codified in Title 30, chapter 14, part 28 of the Montana Code. It sits in the same chapter as the statute Montana actually used, which makes the two easy to confuse, and plenty of coverage will confuse them. The complaint contains no count under it. Its single cause of action and its prayer for relief cite only part 1 of chapter 14.

Three differences explain what the choice changes:

Coverage. Most of the privacy act reaches only a person that conducts business in Montana, or produces products or services targeted to Montana residents, and controls or processes the personal data of "not less than 25,000 consumers" or of "not less than 15,000 consumers and derive more than 25% of gross revenue from the sale of personal data" (MCA 30-14-2803(1), as amended in 2025). Three sections, 30-14-2811, 30-14-2818 and 30-14-2819, apply with no consumer-count threshold under 30-14-2803(2). The deceptive-practices statute has no threshold at all. It reaches "any trade or commerce."

Timing. The privacy act took effect October 1, 2024. The enacting bill says so in a single line: section 14 of Chapter 681, Laws of Montana 2023 (Senate Bill 384) provides that "[This act] is effective October 1, 2024." Much of the conduct the complaint describes is earlier, including the 2015 Verisk agreement the complaint calls the first of many, the 2018 Wejo agreement, the 2019 LexisNexis Risk Solutions agreement and the discontinuation of Smart Driver in 2024. The state does not explain its reasoning on the pages we read, and we are not assigning it one, but the dates are worth noticing.

Remedies and procedure. Under MCA 30-14-2817 the attorney general "has exclusive authority and may use the duties and powers provided by Title 30, chapter 14, parts 1 and 2, to enforce violations pursuant to this part," may issue civil investigative demands under 30-14-113, and the act creates no private right of action. The 60-day notice-and-cure step the original 2023 act required is gone. Section 12(2) of Chapter 681, Laws of Montana 2023 required the attorney general to issue a notice of violation and allow 60 days to correct it, and section 15 of that chapter would have terminated the step on April 1, 2026. The 2025 legislature got there first: Chapter 567, Laws of Montana 2025 (Senate Bill 297, approved May 8, 2025) repealed section 15 of Chapter 681 outright and, in the same act, struck the cure subsection from 30-14-2817. The current text of 30-14-2817 carries no cure requirement.

If you came for the standing rules rather than the lawsuit, we cover which businesses the privacy act actually reaches in more detail there.

What Happens Next

The next entry on the public record would normally be a response from GM and OnStar, and we cannot tell you whether one exists.

Montana's online court records did not respond when we checked on November 2, 2026, and we have no verified docket entry after the complaint itself. So the posture is unverified: we are not reporting that nothing has happened, and we are not reporting that GM has failed to answer. We also do not name the assigned judge. The clerk's electronic stamp carries a judge's name below the case number, but we did not confirm an assignment against a docket or a court listing, and a stamp is not a docket.

Developments that would make this a story again:

• An answer, a motion to dismiss, or any attempt by GM to move the case to federal court.
• A scheduling order or trial setting, given that the state has demanded a jury.
• Any ruling that reaches willfulness under MCA 30-14-142(4), because the ceiling on fines turns on that finding rather than on liability alone.
• Any order on the deletion request, which asks for destruction of driving data held by third parties and not only by GM.
• A Montana resolution, which would let the state's terms be compared directly with the multistate judgments and California's.
• Movement in Nebraska, whose posture we also could not confirm.

We will update this page as the record changes.

Analysis: Why This Matters

The following is analysis from the Recording Law Editorial Team.

The choice of statute is the most informative thing in the filing. Connected-car data is being litigated by states under general deceptive-practices law rather than under the new privacy acts. Montana pleaded the Unfair Trade Practices and Consumer Protection Act. Nebraska pleaded its Consumer Protection Act and the Uniform Deceptive Trade Practices Act in July 2025. California's resolution paired the Consumer Privacy Act with the Unfair Competition Law, an older and broader statute. These consumer-protection acts are decades old, deliberately open-textured, enforced by attorneys general without any coverage threshold, and, crucially, they were already in force during the years the alleged conduct took place. A privacy act that took effect in October 2024 cannot reach a 2015 data-licensing agreement. A 1973 deceptive-practices statute can, subject to the five-year discovery window in MCA 30-14-111(1).

MCA 30-14-104(1) is also doing real work in the complaint, and it cuts in a direction worth naming. It tells a Montana court to give due consideration and weight to Federal Trade Commission and federal-court interpretations of section 5(a)(1), and the complaint pairs that instruction with the FTC's January 2026 order against the same companies. The limit is that a consent order resolves allegations without litigated findings, so how much interpretive weight the FTC's GM order carries under section 104 is a question no Montana court has answered. The order's substance is narrower than most summaries of it suggest, too: five years of restriction on disclosure to entities acting as consumer reporting agencies, not a prohibition on data sharing generally.

The remedy mix is the third signal. Montana is not primarily asking for money for drivers. Its prayer asks for a declaration, a permanent injunction, civil fines payable to the state, and deletion and destruction of all driving data including copies held by third parties. Deletion of data already sold is the hardest item on that list to accomplish and the most consequential if accomplished, because it reaches the brokers' copies rather than only GM's future behavior. The multistate judgments took a different shape, requiring affirmative express consent going forward and dividing $220 million among the participating states.

Which of those approaches serves consumers better is not something a filed complaint can tell us, and we are not going to predict how a Montana court will resolve any of it. What the record does show is that being outside a coalition deal is not the same as having no case.

How This Affects You

Nothing in the Montana case creates a claim or a payment for an individual driver. The suit is brought by the state in the public interest under MCA 30-14-111, and the prayer for relief, as filed, asks for fines payable to the state and for deletion of data rather than for payments to drivers. The privacy act Montana did not use expressly provides no private right of action either.

There is also no claims process to look for, in Montana or in the multistate judgments, which divide the money among the participating states and pay each plaintiff directly. A website offering to file a GM driver-data claim on your behalf is therefore not processing anything a court has created.

If your interest is what your own vehicle collects and who can receive it, the FTC order places access, deletion and opt-out obligations on GM and OnStar for 20 years, and consent obligations on top of the five-year consumer-reporting-agency restriction. Those duties run against the companies through the federal order, not through the Montana case. And if the underlying question on your mind is when tracking a vehicle's location is lawful in the first place, that is a separate body of law: we cover how Montana treats tracking a vehicle's location separately from this filing.

This is general legal information, not legal advice. It covers a Montana state-court lawsuit and related federal and multistate actions, and reflects sources verified on November 2, 2026. The allegations are unproven and the case is pending; laws change and this story is developing. Consult a lawyer licensed in your jurisdiction about your specific situation.

Related articles

• What the 36 settling jurisdictions actually agreed to, and why no money reaches drivers
• Where Montana's consumer data rules stand today
• GPS tracking laws by state

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Last updated: 2026-11-02. This is a developing story; details verified as of 2026-11-02.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Montana part of the GM $220 million settlement?

No. The Michigan attorney general's October 29, 2026 release lists the settling coalition as Michigan plus 35 other jurisdictions, and Montana is not among them. Montana also does not appear in the party list in footnote 1 of the consent judgment those jurisdictions filed. Montana filed its own suit on October 16, 2026 and is litigating separately.

What law did Montana sue GM and OnStar under?

The Montana Unfair Trade Practices and Consumer Protection Act. The complaint pleads one cause of action under MCA 30-14-103 with 13 listed practices, and asks for civil fines under MCA 30-14-142 and the vulnerable-adult penalty under MCA 30-14-144. It is not an enforcement action under the Montana Consumer Data Privacy Act.

Can a Montana driver get money from this lawsuit?

The prayer for relief, as filed, asks for a declaration, a permanent injunction, civil fines payable to the state, deletion and destruction of driving data, and fees and costs. It does not ask for payments to individual drivers, and there is no claims process in the case.

Did the FTC fine GM over OnStar driving data?

The FTC issued its order in Docket No. C-4828 on January 13, 2026 and announced it on January 14, 2026. The FTC's press release lists no monetary payment. The order bars disclosure of covered driver data to any person acting as a consumer reporting agency for five years and runs 20 years in total.

Has GM responded to the Montana complaint?

We could not confirm that. Montana's online court records did not respond when we checked on November 2, 2026, so the docket status is unverified. We are not reporting that GM has answered, and we are not reporting that it has not.

Does the Montana Consumer Data Privacy Act apply to GM?

That is not what this case tests. The privacy act took effect October 1, 2024 under section 14 of Chapter 681, Laws of Montana 2023, and applies to businesses above the thresholds in MCA 30-14-2803. The attorney general enforces it exclusively and it creates no private right of action. Montana's GM complaint pleads the older deceptive-practices statute instead.

What driving data does the complaint say GM collected?

Paragraph 3 lists 36 categories, including GPS coordinates, vehicle speed, hard braking, hard acceleration, seat belt status and instances of driving above 80 miles per hour, and alleges the data came from more than 14 million vehicles, many of them bought, owned and driven in Montana.