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Comment by ck2 | Hacker News Reader

Wow, quotes without having to get a credit and background check on every insurance site?

Oh wait, DOB and SS# and driver's license?

Um, NO - there is no need for this kind of info to get a general quote - I've had it with big insurance harvesting personal info. There really ought to be a law.

Car insurance quote should be three questions:

    1. What zip code do you live in
    2. What year were you born
    3. What do you drive

(and obviously if you've had accidents recently)

Insurance tables shouldn't work like they do. What they are trying to figure out from all your personal info is if you own or rent, where you work, how many times you have moved recently, etc. That's a bunch of bull.

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No, insurance depends on your previous fuckups, so you definitely need DOB and SSN. Otherwise they might misquote you, which can end up in court.

They they should have two types of quotes.

A "soft" quote based on general information.

A "hard" quote based on very specific information.

They'd never convince me they cannot do this, especially with all the extremely misleading commercials on television.

They probably can, but why would you want to see it? It would be a quote for some "average" person, and might be off by a an order of magnitude from your particular case.

Because I have no accidents/tickets for over a decade and pay only $300 for a year, but since they raise my rate every six months by 10% "just for the heck of it" - I'd like to see what everyone else quotes me.

A soft quote would be just fine for me and probably many others.

Well seeing as you were only paying $100 a year 5.5 years ago you cant complain that much. I can not believe you got such good rates 5 years ago.

There's usually some disclaimer saying this is just a quote and may differ from the actually policy written for you.

Yes, and the price difference between the hypothetical quote and the real quote is so big as to make the hypo quote irrelevant. Insurance quotes that don't take your PI are bait-and-switch ploys, not services.

A smart thing to do here might be to figure out a way to do progressive quotes/queries; take the DOB+zip+car information just to start, then let the user decide whether the variance in the results (which will be the best-case ones) merit coughing up more info.

So as a hypothetical ignorant consumer, they'd bait me into providing more information. The effort to get my initial quote would require significantly less data - I'd see the results, like what I see (a.k.a. establish trust) and then it wouldn't be much more effort to get that SSN/DOB at that point.

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