"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," says Joseph Sullivan, director of the "law enforcement and compliance" department at eBay.com.
"He says he receives about 200 such requests a month, most of them unofficial requests in the form of an email or fax. All they have to do is ask. 'There's no need for a court order,' Sullivan said, and related how the company has half a dozen investigators under contract, who scrutinize 'suspicious users' and 'suspicious behavior.'"
Blind obedience in times when terrorism is used to justify basically all kinds of privacy breaches, in times when everyone is a suspect until proven innocent? Of course not. It's called flexbility: "'I don't know another Web site that has a privacy policy as flexible as eBay's,' says Joseph Sullivan."
Read the full story in Tel Aviv's Ha'aretz newspaper.
Large parts of the paper's current print edition are also available in PDF format. Story via Paul Nitsche
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