If you drive a car made by General Motors and it has an internet connection, your car’s movements and exact location are being collected and shared anonymously with a data broker.

This practice, disclosed in a letter sent by Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Ed Markey of Massachusetts to the Federal Trade Commission on Friday, is yet another way in which automakers are tracking drivers, often without their knowledge.

Previous reporting in The New York Times, which the letter cited, revealed how automakers including GM, Honda and Hyundai collected information about drivers’ behavior, such as how often they slammed on the brakes, accelerated rapidly and exceeded the speed limit. It was then sold to the insurance industry, which used it to help gauge individual drivers’ riskiness.

The two Democratic senators, both known for privacy advocacy, zeroed in on GM, Honda and Hyundai because all three had made deals, the Times reported, with Verisk, an analytics company that sold the data to insurers.

In the letter, the senators urged FTC Chair Lina Khan to investigate how the auto industry collects and shares customers’ data.

One of the surprising findings of an investigation by Wyden’s office was just how little the automakers made from selling driving data. According to the letter, Verisk paid Honda $25,920 over four years for information about 97,000 cars, or 26 cents per car. Hyundai was paid just over $1 million, or 61 cents per car, over six years.

GM would not reveal how much it had been paid, Wyden’s office said. People familiar with GM’s program previously told the Times that driving behavior data had been shared from more than 8 million cars, with the company making an amount in the low millions of dollars from the sale. GM also previously shared data with LexisNexis Risk Solutions.

“Companies should not be selling Americans’ data without their consent, period,” the letter from Wyden and Markey stated. “But it is particularly insulting for automakers that are selling cars for tens of thousands of dollars to then squeeze out a few additional pennies of profit with consumers’ private data.”

— New York Times