Big Brother is watching you on eBay - and documenting

Haaretz ^ | February 21, 2003 | Yuval Dror

[Positive]

"I say.. the IRS has no law enforcement ability. It is a quasi regulatory agency. It has no law enforcement powers."

I think you're right, maybe you know, isn't the Secret Service the "law enforcement" arm of the Treasury Department in addition to providing security for the President and Klinton?

[stuartcr]

Good point.

[Nick Danger]

Well I'm done for...they'll know about my buying "loose" (as opposed to mint in package) Star Wars action figures.

Me too. I like those old IBM "clickety-clack" keyboards. They don't make them anymore, so eBay is where I go to get them.

This is definitely a "pick your battles" moment for me, and after carefully considering it, I've decided that I don't care if they know about my keyboards. Nor do I think they have time to worry about my keyboards. There is in fact great privacy in being one database record among 30 million.

People who worry about this stuff should shop in person and pay cash. Frankly, I want eBay to be out there announcing that they are law enforcement's right arm, because if they don't, eBay will turn into a nest of thieves offering items that will never ship, that won't be as advertised, and so on. That will wreck the whole thing. It's better that they are loud and scary about their cooperation with the cops.

All life is tradeoffs. On eBay, I worry more about thieves than I do about government agents finding out that I bought Office 2000 at a great price after Office XP came out.

[boris]

"I like those old IBM "clickety-clack" keyboards. They don't make them anymore, so eBay is where I go to get them."

Oh yesssss...

I loved the feel, and everyone knows God intended the function keys to be on the left side of the keyboard.

All of a sudden IBM forgot everything it had learned about ergonomics. For a while you could buy Northgate keyboards, which (IMHO) were the very finest ever made. Alas.

--Boris

[Queen Jadis]

Funny...AND informative.

[Positive]

Nice of you to say.

[Dont Mention the War]

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[Dont Mention the War]

uBid, for one. Yahoo auctions.

And Amazon, and a whole host of other sites. The problem is that eBay controls about 80% of the entire online auction market. If you go to Yahoo or Amazon or somewhere else, your chances of making a successful sale are much lower, and if you do get bids you're likely not to get as many, and thus not make as much money.

Actually, I think it's even worse than that. I have a bot monitoring Amazon's auctions site for a certain keyword, and I have, honestly, seen a *lot* of the same items continually advertised for over THREE YEARS without a single bid. And they're not bizarre obscurities; they're normal items that I know would sell during a single 4-6 day listing on eBay.

In short, if you want any real chance of selling your item and getting a decent profit on it, you have no real choice except eBay.

In any case, I think this policy is eventually going to come around and bite eBay on the ass. Wait until they get hit with a $50 million dollar suit for handing over someone's credit card numbers to a 16-year-old who forged a fax with his local PD's "letterhead" on it. (How long would that take to mock up, five minutes?)

[serinde]

"In short, if you want any real chance of selling your item and getting a decent profit on it, you have no real choice except eBay."

I agree. Also, if you want to BUY anything, you have a much better chance of finding the wanted item on ebay. I've checked out some of the other auction sites, but they usually don't have anything of interest to me.

[savedbygrace]

Thank you. That's what thought, but I was hopeful that the alternatives were effective. I'm sure a lot of stuff sells through those other channels, but much, much more through ebay.

[browardchad]

All life is tradeoffs. On eBay, I worry more about thieves than I do about government agents finding out that I bought Office 2000 at a great price after Office XP came out.

LOL -- I feel the same way. There's no mention in the article about why E-Bay retains all the sales info -- so they can keep profiles on sellers or buyers, accessible to both. I check out sellers' profiles before I buy, and I appreciate the fact that they keep my profile on file, though it may be quite a few months between purchases.

[Traffic_Can]

and besides, the IRS gots guns..