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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.""
Oh damn. This is going to sink the price of my 10 pounds of weapons enriched uranium that are up for auction at the moment. Terrorist#597 has already pulled his bid.
Actually, I would be much happier if law enforcement took a harder stance on ebay auctions. There need to be provisions in ebay license terms that keep everyone's indentities out in the open. Online auctions present an incredible opportunity for fraud. It is important that law enforcement has the power to go after the scammers.
I'm not so sure. By selling something on the web through ebay, there is an implied lack of privacy between the parties making the transaction. You need to interact with the buyer, and careful buyers are not going to send money to a completely anonymous source (in the traditional way). As a buyer, I agree, being anonymous may be a nice feature. If you are a buyer and not anonymous, is that a feature or a bug? Either way, should law enforcement have access to the record of these transactions? They can already know that the transaction occurred, because that is public, they just don't know the participating parties. By not having the parties open, it puts a lot of trust into ebay and opens up for the possibility of abuses (by ebay). Personally, since the transactions are already public, I would consider the possibility of doing something counterintuitive, have every transaction be public (including the parties involved). It should then be up to the involved parties to go through an anonymous broker if they are concerned about their privacy. In this framework, ebay cannot commit abuses and the privacy concern rests with the (negotiable) relationship between the seller/buyer and the broker who provides anonynimity (sp?). Then ebay doesn't even need a privacy policy.
-Sean
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.
Of course, if the nice policeman asks about my colleagues, business partners, and neighbours, I will joyfully click the heals and report everything he wants to know.
No need for check and balances. What are subpoenas good for but hindering good policemen at their work.
In order to protect our wonderful democratic country, I will report any person, which reads suspicious books, or buys suspicious things.
Now, it is not like you should not cooperate with the police, but the way he speaks of it, he sounds a little bit too similar to the kind of person I imitated.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
Three words:
"Slippery Slope"
"Warrant"
If these do not cause you to at least reflect on the implications of the article, you may as well live in Argentina, circa 1977. I'm sure plenty good citizens in Buenos Aires said "I have no real expectation of privacy, but then again, I'm not diong anything wrong, so why should I care?"
It is precisely because these sorts of behaviors have been disallowed for law-enforcement and these freedoms have been upheld for individuals, that the US was never as heinous as Argentina or Spain or ....
There is no "magic" quality inherent in the United States that will guarantee the freedom and liberty of the people if you begin to trivialize or ignore the abandonment of these controls.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
If you grok german, read the related item on heise news.
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
If eBay does have all this user data, then why the hell aren't they using it to stop the scammers sooner? After a friend of mine got burned by selling a laptop to a bidder that used a stolen paypal account, I watched this scammer buy (steal) TWO MORE $1500 LAPTOPS before he lost his account.
So really, eBay. Stop the scammers. We'd all like that a lot. Besides, it's not like any privacy zealots use eBay; you can see anyone's buying/selling history just by clicking around in the feedback.
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
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.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."