On January 13, 2025, the Texas Attorney General filed the first enforcement action ever brought under the Texas Data Privacy and Security Act. The defendants were Allstate Corporation and its subsidiary Arity. The same month, a federal class action was filed against the same parties in US District Court. Both complaints name four consumer mobile apps that, according to the filings, embedded an Arity-authored tracking SDK that collected detailed driving behavior data from end users. The four apps named in the complaints are GasBuddy, Life360, Fuel Rewards, and Routely.
These are allegations in pending litigation. Nothing has been adjudicated. But the complaints are public records, the federal judge has allowed the class action to proceed under the laws of 20 states, trial is scheduled for June 2026, and the legal filings contain enough detail that consumers picking a gas app today have a basis to ask which apps embed driver-behavior tracking and which do not. This piece walks through what the public filings say, what data was allegedly collected and how, and how to evaluate a gas app's privacy posture before installing it.
What Arity is, and what an embedded SDK does
Arity is a telematics company founded by Allstate in 2016 and owned by the same parent. Its business model is to license a software development kit (SDK) to third-party app developers who embed it inside consumer apps. Once embedded, the SDK runs in the background whenever the host app has location and motion permissions active. The data the SDK is engineered to collect includes continuous GPS coordinates, speed, acceleration, braking patterns, bearing (direction of travel), and time stamps for each measurement. According to the Texas Attorney General's press release, this produces driving behavior data at a level of detail comparable to what a usage-based insurance telematics device installed in a vehicle would generate.
The Texas complaint alleges that Arity then aggregated the collected data into what the AG described as "the world's largest driving behavior database" covering an estimated 45 million Americans. The complaint further alleges that Arity sold access to the data to Allstate and to other insurance carriers, which used it to adjust premium pricing, decline coverage, and market additional products to identified drivers.
The four apps named in the complaints
Both the state and federal complaints name the same four apps as having embedded the Arity SDK in exchange for payment from Arity. Per the public filings, the apps are GasBuddy (gas price finder owned by PDI Technologies since 2021), Life360 (family location sharing), Fuel Rewards (a station loyalty program operated by PDI Technologies at the time of the complaints; Shell Oil Products US acquired the program from PDI in April 2025, with PDI continuing as the technology service provider), and Routely (a route planning app). Keller Rohrback, a consumer protection plaintiff firm, has also named MyRadar (weather radar) in its separate public investigation announcement.
One detail worth surfacing: PDI Technologies owned two of the four named apps in January 2025 when the complaints were filed. GasBuddy has been under PDI since the April 2021 acquisition, and Fuel Rewards was acquired by PDI in 2018 (through PDI's acquisition of Excentus Corp., the program's original operator) and remained under PDI ownership until the Shell sale closed in April 2025. The concentration of two named apps under a single corporate parent during the alleged conduct period is a public record fact established by the acquisition announcements; it is not a legal characterization of any party's role.
The pattern across the four apps is that they each have a consumer-facing primary purpose unrelated to driving telematics, and each requires location and motion permissions to fulfill that primary purpose. A gas price app needs location to show nearby stations. A family location sharing app needs location by definition. A fuel rewards app uses location to credit purchases at stations. A route planning app needs location and motion to compute and adjust routes. Per the complaints, those permissions were used to also support the embedded Arity SDK data collection.
Where the cases stand
The Texas Attorney General is seeking civil penalties under the Texas Data Privacy and Security Act (up to $7,500 per violation) and the Texas Data Broker Law (up to $10,000 per violation), with the total exposure stated as exceeding $1 million given the scale alleged. This is the first-ever enforcement under the TDPSA, which took effect July 2024.
The federal class action consolidates plaintiffs from multiple states. In March 2026, US District Judge Jeremy Daniel issued a ruling allowing the class to proceed with claims under the laws of 20 states while dismissing three of 38 originally pled claims. Trial is currently scheduled for June 2026. Class certification, if granted, would extend potential recovery to all consumers in the certified states whose data was allegedly collected through one of the named apps.
The named app developers themselves have not, as of this writing, been added as direct defendants in either the state or federal action. The complaints frame the apps as the channel through which Arity's SDK operated, not as the originator of the alleged conduct. This distinction matters legally, but it is largely irrelevant to a consumer asking "did this app send my driving data to an insurance company," for which the answer in the complaints is "yes, the SDK embedded in the app did exactly that."
How to evaluate a gas app's privacy posture
Three signals are practical and accessible to a consumer installing a gas-price app today:
Privacy policy specifics. A privacy policy that names third-party SDK partners, telematics partners, or data brokers in its data sharing section is more honest than one that uses only generic categories. The presence of words like Arity, telematics, driving behavior, or motor vehicle data in a gas app's privacy policy is a meaningful indicator. Absence is not proof of nothing being collected, but presence is proof that something is.
Permission requests at install. A gas-price app needs foreground location to show nearby stations. It does not strictly need continuous background location, motion sensor access (accelerometer or gyroscope), or "physical activity" detection. Apps that request the latter are technically capable of running an Arity-style SDK whether or not they actually do; apps that request only the minimum foreground location cannot.
Account requirements. Apps that require an account, phone number, or email address before showing results have a persistent user identifier they can attach collected data to. Apps that work anonymously cannot link session data to a real-world identity without additional steps.
What Gas Price Check does and does not do
Gas Price Check is a web application, not a native mobile app. It does not embed third-party tracking SDKs because there is no SDK layer in a web application to embed them in. It does not require an account to use the gas search. It uses Vercel Web Analytics for aggregate site traffic patterns, a privacy- friendly analytics service that does not identify individual users. It does not sell location, driving-pattern, or any other data to insurance companies, data brokers, or any third party.
The site is funded by affiliate partnerships (Insurify auto insurance comparison, AAA Membership in seven western states, Expedia hotel deals in tourism destinations, Rexing dash cams, and Amazon Associates product links). Affiliate links route users to those partners only when the user clicks an outbound link. The partners do not receive any pre-click data about the user. See the privacy policy for the full description of what data is and is not collected.
What to do today
If you currently use one of the apps named in the public complaints and you are concerned about driving data collection, the practical options are: review the app's current privacy policy and disable any optional data sharing categories; revoke background location and motion sensor permissions in your device's app settings (which limits the SDK's capability even if it remains installed); or uninstall the app and choose an alternative that does not require those permissions. If the federal class action settles or a judgment is entered in favor of the class, members of the certified class will be notified by the court or settlement administrator about how to claim any awarded relief.
For finding cheap gas without installing a tracking app, Gas Price Check returns the cheapest stations near any US ZIP code in roughly 1 to 2 seconds on a typical mobile connection, with no signup required.
