Toyota, Progressive, and Your Car’s Data: What the Class Action Means for Florida Drivers
A client came into our office last spring about a rear-end claim on US-41 and, almost as a side note, asked me whether the dealership had been selling their trip data to the insurance carrier the whole time. The answer was yes — and they had no clear way of knowing. That conversation has repeated itself more times than I can count since the Toyota/Progressive class action started drawing attention, and it is why I wanted to put this down in plain English.
This blog is not legal advice on the class action itself. It is a plain-English read on what the lawsuit is alleging, how Florida law treats the same conduct, and what it means for somebody who drives the I-75 corridor through Lee and Collier Counties every day. I have watched the data side of car-accident cases change quickly over the last five years, and the people who are getting hurt by it are the same ones who get hurt in the wreck itself — drivers who trust that the systems around them are working fairly.
What Florida law actually says about car-data sharing
Florida does not have a single, clean statute that says “a carmaker cannot sell your telematics data to your insurance carrier without written consent.” It has a patchwork. The pieces that matter most for an injured driver are the ones that govern what happens after a wreck, because that is where the data shows up against you.
Three statutes are worth knowing by number.
Section 768.81, Florida Statutes, is the modified comparative negligence rule. In plain English: after the 2023 reform, if a jury decides you are more than fifty percent at fault for your own crash, you recover nothing. If you are fifty percent or less at fault, your recovery is reduced by your percentage. So if telematics data shows you were going sixty-three in a fifty-five and the defense uses that to push your fault number from forty to fifty-one, the entire case goes to zero. The data is no longer a curiosity — it is the case.
Section 95.11(4)(a) is the statute of limitations. The 2023 reform cut the window for most negligence cases from four years to two. That matters in a data context because the file that proves what happened often takes months to pull and another few months to read, and people lose claims by waiting.
Section 627.736 is PIP — the Florida no-fault rule that gives you up to ten thousand dollars in medical and lost-wage benefits regardless of who caused the wreck, as long as you treat with a qualified provider within fourteen days. The PIP carrier is allowed to look at the same telematics data when it decides whether to pay or deny benefits, and most drivers do not know that until the denial letter shows up.
None of these three statutes were written with carmaker-to-carrier data sales in mind. They are the rules the data lands inside of.
How car-data sharing actually reaches your claim: four patterns from our files
After thirty years of personal injury practice in Florida, I can tell you that almost every “car data” story we see in the office fits into one of four patterns:
- Opt-in driving score programs. The client signed up for a discount app — Snapshot, Drivewise, similar — and forgot about it. The carrier raises the rate at renewal based on hard-braking events. The client thought the program had ended.
- Manufacturer-to-broker sales. The carmaker collects connected-vehicle data through the head unit and sells it to a data broker, which sells it to a carrier. The client never knowingly opted in. This is the pattern at the heart of the Toyota/Progressive complaint and the earlier General Motors stories.
- Crash-event data downloads. After a wreck, the adverse carrier sends an investigator to pull the event-data recorder. Five seconds of speed, throttle, braking, and seatbelt status come off the car. We see this most often in serious-injury cases on I-75 and in commercial-truck wrecks on US-41.
- Insurance-app passive collection. The client downloaded the carrier’s app to manage the policy, granted location access, and now the carrier has a continuous trip log. The app never said it would be used at renewal. The renewal letter says otherwise.
Three of those four scenarios involve data the driver did not understand they were sharing. That is the real grievance in the class action, and it is the same grievance I hear from clients in our office every month.
Why car-data cases take more work than they appear to
The reason these cases are difficult is not the technology. It is that the rules have not caught up. Three practical complications come up over and over.
First, the data lives in multiple places. Some of it is on the car itself, in the event-data recorder. Some sits with the manufacturer in its connected-vehicle backend. Some is at the broker. Some is at the carrier. If you only send a preservation letter to one of those four, the others can purge their copy under their ordinary retention policy and nobody breaks a rule.
Second, the data is rarely as clean as the defense will say it is. A hard-braking event on the I-75 corridor between Bonita Springs and Naples might just mean a tractor-trailer drifted into your lane and you did exactly what a reasonable driver does. Pulled into a PowerPoint with no context, it looks like aggressive driving. The job of the case is to put the context back.
Third, Florida’s privacy framework is still being built. The Florida Digital Bill of Rights passed in 2023, but it applies to a narrow set of large data-collecting businesses and has carve-outs that most carmakers and carriers are arguing keep them out of reach. Until the courts work that out, drivers are largely left with general consumer-protection arguments and the unfair-trade-practices statute.
The takeaway for anyone reading this after a Lee or Collier County wreck: assume there is data, ask for it in writing, and do not let your own carrier or the adverse carrier hold it without you seeing it.
What we did on a US-41 rear-end claim
We have handled this kind of fact pattern many times across Lee and Collier Counties. Without identifying the client or the carrier, the shape is almost always the same. Somebody is rear-ended on US-41 or sideswiped on the I-75 corridor. They are hurt enough to need an orthopedist and a few months of physical therapy. The PIP carrier pays a portion of the medical bills under §627.736 and then quietly stops, citing an “independent” record review.
When we open the claim file, we find that the carrier had pulled connected-vehicle data through a third party and was building an argument that the client was going several miles over the limit at the moment of impact. The client had never opted in to anything they understood as a data-sharing program.
Two things happened once we did that. The carrier could not produce a clean chain of custody, which made the speed number much weaker as a defense. And the medical picture, documented properly, made the injuries impossible to argue down. The case settled at a number that fit the harm. The lesson we took from it — and the one I share with every new client — is that the data is only as powerful as the silence around it. The minute you ask for it in writing, half its power disappears.
What to do if you think your car’s data is being used against you
This is the practical, observed-from-experience list. Not generic. Each item is on the list because we have watched it change the outcome of a real case.
- Pull the connected-services menu in the car the day you buy it. Toggle off any setting labeled “data sharing,” “usage analytics,” “driving behavior,” or “third-party partners.” Take a photo of the screen showing the toggles off. That photo is evidence later.
- Read the page of the new-car paperwork that authorizes telematics enrollment. If you do not want it, write “declined” on the line and initial it. Most dealerships will still complete the sale.
- Send a written data-access request to the manufacturer every twelve months. Keep the response. If you ever have a wreck, you will have a baseline of what the manufacturer was holding before the crash and what they were holding after.
- If you are in a wreck, ask your attorney to send preservation letters the same week. One to your carrier, one to the adverse carrier, one to the manufacturer, and one to any data broker the manufacturer names. Sixty days is enough time for some retention policies to delete the evidence you need.
- Do not give a recorded statement to the adverse carrier without counsel. If they already have telematics data, the recorded statement is the move that lets them line up your words against the data. The combination is harder to walk back than either one alone.
- If your renewal premium jumps, ask in writing for the rating factors. Florida insurers must give you a usable explanation. If the answer references driving behavior you never agreed to share, file a complaint with the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation. The complaint creates a record even if the agency does not act on it.
Key Takeaways
- The Toyota/Progressive class action is the loudest version of a pattern we have been seeing in our office for years: carmakers, brokers, and carriers passing driving data around without the driver understanding the deal.
- Florida’s modified comparative negligence rule under §768.81 makes telematics data dangerous after a wreck — a few miles over the limit can move your fault percentage past fifty and zero out the entire case.
- The 2023 statute-of-limitations cut to two years under §95.11(4)(a) means data-heavy cases need to move quickly.
- PIP carriers under §627.736 are already using connected-vehicle data to support denials; ask for the data file in writing as soon as a denial lands.
- Toggling the car’s data-sharing settings off, declining the dealership opt-in, and sending early preservation letters do more for an injured client than any after-the-fact legal argument.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Florida law let a carrier raise my rates based on data pulled from my car?
Florida regulates how insurers set and change premiums, but the state has not yet built a clean rule that requires carriers to tell you which third-party data feeds they used to do it. If a discount program asks you to opt in, that is one path. If a manufacturer quietly sells driving data to a broker that then sells it to your carrier, you usually find out only when the renewal arrives. Read the renewal page that lists the rating factors and ask in writing how each one was scored.
If my car’s data was sold without my consent, do I have a personal-injury claim?
Not by itself. A privacy breach is a separate claim from a crash claim. But after a wreck, the same telematics feed that priced your policy can show up in the file the defense uses to argue you were speeding or distracted. If you are reading this after a collision, ask your lawyer to send a preservation letter so the carrier and the manufacturer cannot quietly purge the data that helps you.
How do I find out what my car is collecting and sharing right now?
Start with the connected-services menu in the head unit and the privacy page on the manufacturer’s app. Toggle the data-sharing options off if you do not want them on. Then file a written data-access request with the manufacturer. They will send back a file showing trip starts, hard-braking events, and any third parties they have shared the data with.
Can my insurance carrier drop me or raise my rate because a manufacturer shared my data?
In Florida, a carrier can non-renew at the end of a term for a long list of reasons and can raise your premium with proper notice. If the rate increase traces back to driving data you never agreed to share, you have a complaint to file with the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation, and you may have a private claim depending on how the data moved from the carmaker to the carrier.
Should I sign the data-sharing opt-in when I buy a new car?
Read it first. Many of those opt-ins authorize the manufacturer to share driving behavior with affiliates, brokers, and insurance carriers. If the benefit is roadside assistance, fine. If the benefit is vague and the data-sharing language is broad, decline it. You can usually still use the car’s safety features without authorizing the broader data sale.
Talk to our office before the data gets used against you
If you have been hurt in a wreck on the I-75 corridor, on US-41, or anywhere across Lee or Collier Counties, and you are worried that telematics data or a carrier’s app is being used to push your case toward zero, call our office at 239-992-8259 for a free consultation. There is no fee unless we recover for you. I would rather hear from you in the first week than the last week — the data preservation work is much easier when there is still time to do it.
About the Author
Pittman Law Firm, P.L. is based across Lee and Collier Counties and has handled personal injury cases for more than thirty years under founder David B. Pittman, Esq. The firm represents injured clients across Lee and Collier Counties — Bonita Springs, Fort Myers, Naples, Estero, Cape Coral, and Lehigh Acres — with offices in Bonita Springs and Fort Myers, and a particular focus on commercial-vehicle, complex-liability, and serious-injury cases.
David’s path to law began at The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina, and continued at the University of South Carolina School of Law. He carries an AV-Preeminent rating with Martindale-Hubbell and a membership in the Multi-Million Dollar Advocates Forum.
David has held a Florida real estate broker license for twenty-five years, a credential that shapes how the firm reads the property side of premises cases. The firm handles personal injury cases across Lee and Collier Counties, serving Fort Myers, Bonita Springs, Naples, Cape Coral, Estero, and Lehigh Acres, with offices at Windsor Place in Bonita Springs (main) and Fort Myers (satellite). Call 239-992-8259 for a free consultation.
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