California Bill Would Let Auto Insurers Use Driver Telematics with Privacy Guardrails
Update, July 27, 2026: this report has been checked against the bill text as amended in the Senate on July 9, 2026, and against the official bill status record. Two corrections follow. AB 311 left the Senate Committee on Privacy, Digital Technologies, and Consumer Protection on an 8-0 vote taken June 29 and is now in Senate Appropriations, set for hearing August 3, 2026; the original report placed it in the privacy committee. The description of the bill’s contents has also been rewritten, because the amended version carries far more than the three provisions first described here.
A California bill now in the Senate would amend Proposition 103 to let insurers use telematics data for private passenger auto ratemaking, but only when drivers choose to be tracked. Assembly Bill 311, the Consumer Driving Data Protection Act of 2026, was passed by the Assembly and is now before the Senate Committee on Appropriations.
Most of AB 311 is privacy machinery. Participation has to be voluntary and backed by written consent, and an insurer may not require telematics to issue or renew a policy, surcharge a driver who declines, or condition a discount on enrollment unless the commissioner approves that discount. Telematics data may be used to rate private passenger auto insurance and for nothing else. The collection limits are itemized: no biometrics, no audio or video of the people in the car or outside it, no selling or licensing the data, no merging it with outside datasets, and no retention past six months. A rate application is not even complete until the insurer hands the department the program description, every data element collected, every scoring model with its algorithms, variables, and weighting factors, the validation studies, and the list of third-party providers under contract. The commissioner may suspend a telematics program outright, or revoke the carrier’s certificate of authority.
The governance angle is not the discount itself. It is the collision between algorithmic pricing, consent architecture, and bias testing. Proposition 103 currently restricts the rating factors insurers can use in California, and the department has long scrutinized whether new data sources could reproduce proxy discrimination. AB 311 would not open the door to any telematics program a carrier wants to run. It would require the department to review each program before it could be used, and Insurance Journal reported that opponents including the CDI and consumer advocates are worried about privacy, transparency, and bias in pricing.
Insurers outside California should still track AB 311 as a state-level template. The bill’s own findings note that California is the last state to require that a driving safety record be measured from Motor Vehicle Report data alone, so any change to Proposition 103’s rating rules would affect how carriers price risk in the state. If AB 311 passes, carriers would need to design telematics programs that can survive CDI review, document the absence of proxy discrimination, and limit data use to the auto rating purpose. Programs that rely on broad data collection, secondary analytics, or cross-selling would likely not fit the bill’s guardrails.
Track the committee calendar and have a position ready before it moves. Even if the bill stalls, the arguments will shape how California and other states write telematics rules. Carriers should also compare the AB 311 approach to Colorado’s algorithmic fairness requirements and the NAIC’s AI model bulletin, because the same tension — how to verify that behavior-based pricing does not discriminate — is showing up in multiple jurisdictions at once.
AB 311’s opt-in construction is the part other states are most likely to copy or reject wholesale, which gives Senate Appropriations’ handling of it reach well past California. The bill tries to settle the proxy question by decree, in a single clause that makes telematics data a driving safety record and bars its use as a stand-in for anything else. Whether one clause can do that work, or whether opt-in consent is only a precondition to asking, will shape behavioral pricing rules long after this bill is settled.