eBay Encourages Government to Access Customer Data at Law & Society Blog

eBay Encourages Government to Access Customer Data

Published by Hanno Kaiser August 11th, 2004 in Law and Society

With amazing candor, Joseph Sullivan, director of the “law enforcement and compliance” department at eBay, encouraged government agencies to request detailed profiles of eBay’s customers. According to this article, Sullivan said to an audience of “securtity professionals:”

“We don’t make you show a subpoena, except in exceptional cases,” Sullivan told his listeners. “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. Which means that if you are a law-enforcement officer, all you have to do is send us a fax with a request for information, and ask about the person behind the seller’s identity number, and we will provide you with his name, address, sales history and other details - all without having to produce a court order. We want law enforcement people to spend time on our site,” he adds. He says he receives about 200 such requests a month, most of them unofficial requests in the form of an email or fax.

The ACLU recently prepared a report about the public-private partnership to build a distributed surveillance network, which would neatly circumvent constitutional protections (collection and storage is private action) and permit private-to-private information exchange of individualized customer data, which might otherwise be impermissible under the antitrust laws.