About a month ago I received my annual auto insurance policy with the invoice to follow. The new cost of the policy was $1200.00 more than the year before and I could not believe the sudden increase. I had not had any accidents or other reasons to file any claims and I still had the same cars except one was newer. I went to see my agent and asked him why my policy cost had risen by so much and his reply was that maybe the company had received a "LexisNexis" report that showed a problem with my credit rating. I got a little angrier since I had not had any loans or other payments that would have affected my credit rating and besides why would my credit rating have anything to do with my auto insurance. His answer was that they took credit ratings into account when costing insurance. I askedif I could get a copy of my "LexisNexis" information and he gave me a number to call. He told me that he would investigate the matter and get back to me in a few days.
I called the number and after having to reveal all of my personal information including my SS#, I was told that I would receive the information in a few days. What I did receive was a path to get the info through the internet which I tried to do but was unsuccessful. I called back and requested that they send the information to my house which they did. In the meantime, the insurance agent called with a new cost figure that was $1200.00 less and told me that when I traded cars the company reclassified me and put me into another bracket that they called preferred. After trying to tell me what preferred meant he proceeded to tell me that they had assumed something rather than lookup my past history which then reduced my cost to the previous amount due to my good driving record.
The report came and I was aghast at the information that was included. It went back over 40 years and included every transaction that I had ever made that included a bank or insurance company. Rather than write all of the different things covered I will just give you the table of contents. !. Identification Records; 2. Address Characteristic Record; 3. Phone Records; 4. Pilot License Records; 5. Online Marketing Records; 6. Insurance Policy Records; and 7. Inquiry Records. The pilot license records even had flight medical exam records.
I was amazed at the amount of information in the packet of 62 pages and started to wonder why this much data on a single person was needed but then started to worry about what other information about me was available. My privacy was no longer private and I was just another public record for any corporation to access when the wished. If you add this to the information that is gathered every time you swipe the little bar code at the grocery store or make a purchase with a credit card we are nothing but complete public records for anyone wishing to use for their marketing and whatever else they may want. It is scary to think that I'm being watched 24 hours a day and I can do nothing about it. Perhaps homelessness isn't that bad after all. You would be hard to follow.
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