The "record penalty" is still less than the profit GM made selling the data.
this post was submitted on 10 May 2026
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General Motors agreed to pay $12.75 million in civil penalties for selling driving data of hundreds of thousands of California motorists to data brokers, allegedly without their consent.
[...] made approximately $20 million from the unlawful sale of their data between 2020 and 2024. The information included names, location information, driving behavior, and contact information
Yep
Cheesus, I'll never understand this. How can the fine be lower than the unlawful gain? Shouldn't paying back the unlawful gain always be the base from which one goes up?
No need to explain, these are rhetorical questions. I know how fucked up the US legal system is esp. wrt corporations.
Honestly, I think there's actually a good chance that the fine's bigger than the profit here. What a lot of people don't realise is that data is only valuable because there's usually a lot of it. The value of your average Facebook user's data is like ten dollars a year and Facebook spends a lot of time trying to increase that to eleven dollars because when multiplied by half a billion users, then it becomes something meaningful.
But still, a fine needs to hurt in order to be effective. $12 million is likely less than what they paid the lawyers.
This fine is like applying a tiny band-aid on the blood-spewing stump of someone's severed limb while allowing the posse of chainsaw wielding maniacs to continue running rampant.