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.""

Ahh the horror!!!!

[zulux]

AHHHH!!!

It absolutly horrable that a company would share information with the law enfocement people of a democratically elected representative republic.

When will the horror end? The next thing you'll know, law enforcemnt people will actuall enforce the law!!!!

Call the ACLU - this is WRONG!

Re:Ahh the horror!!!!

[Yokaze]

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.

Re:Ahh the horror!!!!

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

You are so smug.

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.

Re:Ahh the horror!!!!

[zulux]

You are so smug.

Rather that debate somthing, you slander. Ponder this.

Re:Ahh the horror!!!!

[transiit]

If you're going to nitpick, do it right.

From dictionary.law.com [law.com]

slander

n. oral defamation, in which someone tells one or more persons an untruth about another, which untruth will harm the reputation of the person defamed. Slander is a civil wrong (tort) and can be the basis for a lawsuit. Damages (payoff for worth) for slander may be limited to actual (special) damages unless there is malicious intent, since such damages are usually difficult to specify and harder to prove. Some statements, such as an u

Re:Ahh the horror!!!!

[zulux]

Or was this a "Ha! I can avoid a reasonable argument by making baseless accusations!" sort of thing?


Kind of. I was avoiding a argument with someone who is unreaonable. The kind of peron who has to drum up a little petty hatred now and then to start off.

I'm frankly don't care to debate with people who thing a friendly tip to law enforcement is a magical slippery slope to Hitler/Stallin/Mao-ville.

It's kind of like equating a glass of water with a weapon of mass distruction, 'cause you can drown people in

Re:Ahh the horror!!!!

[transiit]

I'll avoid picking on your difficulties with grammar and spelling because there are many times where my fingers get ahead of my brain, but having read some of your other comments, I feel compelled to point out: It can be distracting.

First, the "slippery slope" is still an informal fallacy. There's no guarantee that one step will lead to another, will lead to another, ad infinitum. But even with that in mind, there's still something to be said for volunteering every bit of information to the powers that be.

Re:Ahh the horror!!!!

[zulux]

Thanks for your reasoned response.

Perhaps I'm a bit jaded - I live in a part of town that we're desperatly trying to clean up.

I've turned in two car thieves, three hard-drug dealers and a dealer/pimp in just the last two years. Our local mom and pop hardware store will turn anybody in that buys a bunch of tubing, vinerger and a propaine tank at the same time.

So naturally, I'm a bit defensive when someone equates my noticing blatant behaviour with a quick slip toward socialism/facisism.

We had a meth hous

Not great news

[Henry V .009]

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.

Since they're doing this anyway...

[Tyrdium]

...what I'd like to see is them use this for prosecuting deadbeat bidders/sellers. It'd make eBay a heck of a lot more reliable...

Hmmm ...

[smoondog]

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

it's legal, but..

[Tirel]

while this is certainly legal (after all, you are using their service, if they state it in their AUP, there's nothing preventing them from telling everyone you bought that used 1960 dildo), but i find it morally disgusting.

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 [heise.de].

Then stop the scammers!

[mraymer]

eBay is full of scammers. I'm not even going to bother with links, just go to eBay and search for just about anything, and you'll see users with feedback in the negatives with reasons such as "this guy is a scammer" and "he never paid me" and "I hope this user is banned" etcetera...

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.

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.

+ve Ebay experiences

[renehollan]

I have had nothing but positive Ebay experiences. Frankly, while I generally value my privacy, I have no qualms about having financial information about the auctions in which I participate freely available.

Of course, caveat emptor. I have checked out sellers carefully: When I spent around US$1100 for a pair of used B&G Radia 520 speakers, from a local seller, I insisted to pay COD, and offered to pay him what would be a reasonable shipping expense on top of byu winning bid. That way, I got to try befo

Can not have both Privacy

[trolman]

and honest trading. If you want privacy when you buy at an auction then whom will trust your bid? Likewise the seller should be allowed to know his customer for many reasons. There is nothing wrong with this statement and I support open bidding and ebay.