eBay Exec. Boasts About Lack Of Users' Privacy

Vertically Integrated writes "The Register has an article about Joseph Sullivan, an eBay executive who has been bragging to 'an audience of law enforcement officials' about the auction site's disregard for the privacy of its users. How true this is is not known, but Sullivan is quoted in the article as saying: "When someone uses our site and clicks on the `I Agree' button, it is as if he agrees to let us submit all of his data to the legal authorities.""

Comments

The Only "True" Confidentiality

[Babbster]

Doctors, lawyers and priests. Those are the people from whom people should be expecting true confidentiality from, particularly in terms of law enforcement cooperation.

Now, I know that there are privacy advocates who believe that everything on the Internet should be anonymous without the express consent of each individual, but that's impractical and isn't always in the public interest. For example, if police know that a criminal shopped at a particular brick and mortar store, they can request lists of transactions along with credit card information. Though these establishments CAN force the police to get a court order, they're under no obligation to do so because there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in the average sales transaction. The same should apply to eBay.

Now, I'm assuming that someone on eBay actually contacts those police departments that request information in a reasonable attempt to verify their identity and keeps a record of said requests (they have numbers so they must at least do the latter), but beyond that I don't think they have a responsibility to make law inforcement jump through more legal hoops. I would imagine that most requests for information from eBay have to do with fraud complaints and I would further argue that eBay has a vested interest, and a responsibility to their customers, in seeing that such cases are resolved and criminals are prosecuted.

Unless eBay is accommodating law enforcements requests for lists of people who buy or sell particular products (autographed copy of Mein Kampf, anyone?), I see this as a non-issue.

Random Trivia

[__past__]

According to german police, about 50% of internet-related crimes in germany are related to eBay or other online auctions ; mostly vendors that take your money but never ever send you anything for it. They also mentioned that the rate of reported incidents that are being successfully brought to court is about 100%, but that a lot of people just won't report it to local police because they think that it's not worth the hassle, thereby letting the criminals get away with.

If you grok german, read the related item on heise news.

ebay needs to police itself, first!

[TheGratefulNet]

I recently had need to engage ebay 'safe harbor'. ha! what a farse.

I bought something from a florida scammer (yeah, florida, I should have known better, huh?). the pkg did arrive but it was the wrong item! I tried for days to contact the seller and finally got thru on the phone yet once they found I was wise to them, they stopped answering the phone. (I block caller id so they wouldn't know it was me, necessarily).

so I emailed safe harbor. of course you cannot EMAIL them - you can only 'click and pray' on their cgi form.

to cut a long story short, I sent at least 4 emails to them to open up a case under my item-id and they never ONCE did anything. not an inquiry about what was wrong - just NOTHING. silence. dialtone. like listening to a seashell.

the morale is: don't buy from ebay unless you can afford to lose your investment. ebay 'safe harbor' is neither helpful, or safe; but they do seem to be harboring known criminals and don't seem to care unless it suits them.