For Sale on Ebay: Your Online Privacy

eBay is working with behavioral targeting technologies, including a test “retargeting” users (that means electronically shadowing) as they visit AOL, MSN, clients of Yahoo’s RightMedia ad exchange and other sites (eBay has contracted with AOL’s Tacoda subsidiary, a behavioral targeting specialist). According to Behavioral Insider, eBay is using “a member’s on-site history to target relevant ads by its many Power Sellers.” As the publication explains, “[T]he world’s biggest online auction house knows a lot about its users’ bidding, browsing and buying habits, and now eBay is leveraging this knowledge in behavioral ad targeting both on and off the site.”

How is eBay tracking users? Here’s what Kasey Chappelle, director of eBay’s marketplace division, told the Insider: “Some of the things we are doing off-eBay involve retargeting where you are traveling to a site after being to eBay and we place an eBay ad there that is going to change depending on what you have done in the past on an eBay site.” eBay’s Scott Shipman explained that the kind of data used to track and target you includes… “category type of data, bidding data, the types of items you may be bidding on or browsing on within the eBay system… What we know about are items you are bidding and browsing and listing and selling in certain categories, so we can pass that information into a profile. When you are out on the Internet and are about to see an eBay ad we can associate that affinity with the ad.”

This, of course, raises serious personal privacy concerns. But while eBay is proclaiming that it’s protecting your privacy—it’s not really in our opinion. That’s because Ebay’s new so-called “AdChoice” privacy scheme is an opt-out service. According to the news report, one can “opt-out” of the system if eBay customers click on various links that then send them “directly to a page that lets then [sic] state a preference whether they want their eBay data used to target that ad to them.”

Here’s how eBay’s Shipman, who serves as its senior counsel, global privacy practice, explains it: “The eBay page explains the AdChoice program, that we care about your information and how you are targeted and marketed to. And if you would prefer that we don’t use your information to target ads to you, you can tell us that you would prefer a generic ad and not have ads targeted to you. And you opt out immediately.”

We placed a call to Mr. Shipman early yesterday, seeking an explanation of the opt-out scheme. But he did not return the call as of this posting.

eBay has been one of the leading companies promoting network neutrality–an open Internet. Protecting privacy is a key component of such an open and democratically-run online medium. Privacy shouldn’t be for sale–even on eBay.

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