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Great idea for a product, but the privacy policy here is seriously inadequate. In order to use this, I would have to give a lot of personally identifiable info
by lambda 15y ago
Great idea for a product, but the privacy policy here is seriously inadequate.
In order to use this, I would have to give a lot of personally identifiable information. The privacy policy basically gives Leaky the right to do whatever they want with my personally identifiable information, such as providing an unlimited set of third parties for "internal business purposes," an unlimited number of present or future affiliates which they will "seek to require" to adhere to the privacy policy, to anyone who may purchase the company or its assets, or for a fairly extensive list of fraud and law enforcement reasons, to disclose it to an unspecified set of entities.
On top of that, there is no limitation on how long Leaky will hold such personally identifiable information, nor any information about how to get Leaky to remove it. So basically, once I enter information into Leaky, they may hold onto it forever and sell it to whoever they like for quite a wide variety of reasons, with no recourse for the user to protect their information.
I don't think that I would ever want to put such personal information in a service with such a weak privacy policy. And given the new model, in which this is just an implementation of the complex pricing structures used by auto insurance agencies, I wonder why this couldn't be made into an application that runs locally and never exposes my personal information to anyone else. Yes, you would probably have to go with a paid application, rather than an ad-supported web site, with all of the problems that entails, but for a product like this with such important privacy concerns and such little value (to the customer) to putting the data online or sharing it with people, it really seems like it would make more sense as an offline application, not a web app.
- rdl 15y agoSure, they could do with a better privacy policy. However, what exactly is the sensitive data here? Your first name, your zip code, your car make/model/year, and your profession. 99.99% of people would happily give you that data for a free pen, just for the asking. Also, while the Leaky guys (being in YC) are likely to actually be better than their privacy policy, what happens when you click over to the actual insurance company and give them your full details (SSN, credit info, vehicle accident history, license info, etc.). I'm more concerned with how AIG will use my data than how a small startup will, and the insurance company is the one collecting vastly more -- and their privacy policy allows them to use it for all sorts of things which are opposed to the user.
- lambda 15y agoSo, I haven't actually tried the service (due to my privacy concerns, as well as just time). I was assuming they would use more information than that (credit info, vehicle accident history, etc) if they were going to do a good job of modeling how car insurers do pricing. The amount of information you mention is not as troubling (though you missed your email address), but I would still like to know that they will delete that information after they are done with it, not retain it forever while maintaining the right to give it to pretty much anyone they want as long as they are "affiliated" with Leaky. And yes, a YC startup may be more trustworthy than an insurance company, but on the other hand, the insurance company needs to collect that information, and is much more heavily regulated, while Leaky, as a private company under not much regulation, can do pretty much anything it wants.
- kenrikm 15y agoI tried it and found that it underestimated my insurance cost by exactly $500 with both Geico and Allstate but interestingly the spread between the two was correct (about $100)
- sakai 15y agoI've noticed some other really oddities (and the pricing is way off for me, unfortunately -- if only I could get a policy for what they're saying!). For example, if I list my occupation as "Consultant", Leaky says Geico will give me a $150 discount. Bizarre. Edit: Clarifying that Leaky says Geico will give me a discount, not that Geico actually does.
- rdl 15y agoAuto insurers will definitely give you a discount for certain fields of employment. "Engineer" drops it $100 or so every time I've tried. My business cards sometimes say "Software Engineer", but I dropped out of a math program, so it's pretty bogus.
- 15y ago