EBay Bows to Pressure Over New Privacy Policy

Under fire from privacy advocates, EBay (Nasdaq: EBAY) has changed a new privacy policy that was scheduled to go into effect Tuesday for new users and on April 19th for registered users.

The policy, posted on the site last month, told users that it was intended to be the last word on EBay's practices, despite what the company might say on other parts of the site.

Flurry of Complaints

Privacy advocates complained that the new policy would allow EBay to misrepresent its privacy practices by making claims throughout the site that were not supported -- or perhaps were even contradicted -- by the main privacy policy.

"It's bad enough that the lack of real privacy standards put the burden on users to figure out what their privacy exposure is at each site," David Martin, principal investigator of the Privacy Foundation, told the E-Commerce Times.

"EBay's proposed change was tantamount to saying that they couldn't keep their message consistent within their company, and turning it into the user's responsibility to know which statement was authoritative."

EBay Capitulates

In the wake of those concerns, EBay agreed to change its policy slightly. The auction giant now encourages users to read the full privacy policy rather than asking them to agree that the full policy is the only definitive privacy statement on the site.

The new section reads: "We have created easy-to-read summaries, privacy principles, a privacy chart and are working on privacy enhancing technology to help summarize our full privacy policy. If you have questions about any part of this summary or if you would like more detailed information, we encourage you to review our full privacy policy."

The Final Word

Despite the softer language, EBay noted that it stands by its previous statement that the full policy is the last word on the subject of privacy.

"We are beginning to offer a variety of helpful privacy pages, summaries and technologies that will help you evaluate our privacy practices. However, we want to be absolutely clear that the privacy policy is what you should rely upon and is the default document in the event of a dispute," the company said in a posting on its site.

"To me," Privacy Foundation's Martin said, "this sounds more like an attempt to defend themselves against potential in-house sloppiness than an attempt to mislead users."

"But I'm glad they backed off on the change."