Even though it is natural for us to shy away from giving out personal information, online car insurance quotes require us to provide a fair amount of it in order to provide us with a reasonably accurate quote. Because of the intrusion in privacy and the risk of being targeted by pushy marketers, you may wonder if it is possible to get an online quote without handing them over as much personal information.
There are some things to keep in mind when addressing this issue, most importantly two critical issues: the business model of the quote providers asking for your information, and the legitimate need of insurance companies for it in order to give you the most appropriate, lowest priced policy possible.
Getting an Accurate Quote
The work of an insurance company is to manage risk. This means they study risk factors in great detail. The companies that are best able to understand and manage risk are able to offer the cheapest policies and still stay in business, while those that don’t get driven out of the market. While as individuals we think only of the most obvious elements like our age, our location and our car, the companies work with a lot more elements in order to remain efficient.
The insurance companies know how all sorts of factors increase or decrease your risk. Even though you as an individual may be an exception, they have to deal with groups in order to average out the differences, and they study the smallest groups possible. From your gender to your grades in school to your employment and driving history, everything you can imagine and more gets factored into their calculations.
While the website providing you with car insurance quotes does the best it can to offer you an accurate rate, this is just their best guess based on however much information they have at hand. When it comes time to buy the actual policy the company will have much more information with which to calculate your real price, so the more information you can provide to the online quotation service, the more likely your quote is to be accurate.
Understanding the Business
While the service offered by websites of this nature are invaluable for market research before you make up your mind on which carrier to use, you need to understand that they are not running a charity. These are companies that need to generate revenue from the service they provide you for free. This revenue usually comes from the insurance companies paying them for the leads they send their way, which requires your personal information to be provided. If visitors didn’t fill in the forms with their information the sites would not only have trouble giving you an accurate quote, they would be unable to generate revenue and stay in business. This makes supplying personal details the cost you pay to use their “free” service.
Can You Get a Quote without Divulging Personal Information?
While there are websites that give rough estimates without requiring much personal information, you can’t take those estimates very seriously. They can be highly inaccurate, and end up making your research harder and more confusing instead of easier. You know what they say; you get what you pay for. In this case, the information you provide is the payment. You can use these more general sites to get a ballpark idea, but you can’t really rely on them for meaningful research.
