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Features: eBay to Law Enforcement - We're Here to Help

Posted by Ernest Miller on Monday, February 17 @ 10:09:15 EST

With Nimrod Kozlovski

Joseph E. Sullivan, Director of Compliance and Law Enforcement Relations, Senior Counsel, Trust and Safety for online auction powerhouse eBay, recently addressed a group of law enforcement officials regarding eBay's policies for cooperating with government investigations. Below are verbatim quotations from his briefing at the recent CyberCrime 2003 conference:

We [eBay] try to make rules to make it difficult for people to commit fraud and easy for you [law enforcement agencies] to investigate. One is our Privacy policy. I know from investigating eBay fraud cases that eBay has probably the most generous policy of any internet company when it comes to sharing information. [emphasis added]
We do not require a subpoena except for very limited circumstances. We require a subpoena when we need the financial information from the site, credit card info or sometimes IP information.

In other words, without a subpoena, eBay will provide all sorts of information to any law enforcement agency for any reason whatsoever. For more about eBay's law enforcement-friendly policy, read on.

Without a subpoena, eBay will provide the following information regarding an eBay user to law enforcement:

Full Name, User ID, Email Address, Street Address, State, City, Zip Code, Phone Number, Country, Company, Password, Secondary Phone, Gender, Personal or Business, Shipping information (Name, Street Address, City, State, Zip)

In addition eBay will provide the following transaction information:

Bidding History on an Item, Other Items for Sale, Feedback about a user, Bidding history of a user, Prices paid for items, Feedback rating, and Chat Room/Bulletin Board (!).

This can be verified through eBay's policy page (eBay Help: Policies). Indeed,

Under our privacy policy basically anybody who signs up to use our site when they click accept they accept this paragraph. And it basically says, you can read, we will use your user information, refer to law enforcement anytime that there is anything that causes any kind of a legal liability for eBay or for you.
Here are the paragraphs that he is referring to:
eBay cooperates with law enforcement inquiries, as well as other third parties to enforce laws, such as: intellectual property rights, fraud and other rights. We can (and you authorize us to) disclose any information about you to law enforcement or other government officials as we, in our sole discretion, believe necessary or appropriate, in connection with an investigation of fraud, intellectual property infringements, or other activity that is illegal or may expose us or you to legal liability.
Additionally, eBay reserves the right (and you authorize eBay) to communicate any information about you (including, but not limited to your policy violations, ended items, and item status) to other users, law enforcement and VeRO members as we in our sole discretion determine necessary or appropriate to maintain a level of trust and safety in our community and to enforce our User Agreement, Privacy Policy and any posted policies or rules applicable to services you use through our site.
Sullivan continues,
So, that really opens the door for us. That means that what our policy is that if you are law enforcement agency you can fax us on your letterhead to request information: who is that beyond the seller ID, who is beyond this user ID. We give you their name, their address, their e-mail address and we can give you their sales history without a subpoena.
That's all you need, a fax on law enforcement letterhead. No reason, no justification, and eBay starts feeding information to law enforcement. Remember when everyone got excited about the bookstore that was subpoened by Ken Starr in order to determine what books Monica Lewinski purchased? Remember how the bookstore fought the subpoena? eBay doesn't even require a subpoena. eBay would have turned over the info with a mere request.

But it gets worse,

We will probably tell you too that you might want to get a subpoena because we are looking for credit card info and you ask that. We cannot turn over that other information [without a subpoena].
Remember that eBay now owns PayPal, which many people use as a bank. How do you like the idea of your bank telling police, "you might want to get a subpoena"?

How much would law enforcement agencies pay? Don't answer yet ... because eBay's surveillance services also include:

We also do other things to facilitate your [law enforcement] investigation by looking and doing some searches around on our own, typically to see if there are some other user ID’s associated with that thing.

eBay is not only "The World's Online Marketplace" but the world's online informant.

We [eBay] are doing a lot of work with law enforcement agencies.
I'll bet.

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