Re: My Big Brother.
Insurance companies subscribe to third-party information gathering services. In return for providing info on their customers, and for a fee, they can do online lookups of information from non-customers who are prospective customers.
As soon as you gave him enough info to do a search, the details appeared on his screen soon after. Farmers did not have your info on-hand.
I can't recall the names of the companies that perform this service. Which is very frustrating because I used to support the mainframe interface with them for a major California insurer.