Hi All (Brumby in particular),
I’ve been through this debate about hidden bidders, in detail, many times before.
Brumby, You make the mistake of believing anything that eBay says; that can be very dangerous—for your wallet. I believe absolutely nothing that they ever say is sincere; everything is “spun” for their benefit. Actually it’s more than simply spin, it’s mostly outright deception on the consumer. They would not bother talking to us at all unless there was some benefit, or the prevention of some loss, to them.
I always refer to eBay users as “users”, for to refer to them as “members”, as eBay does, is to imply that the organisation is run for some benefit of those “members”—it is not: No action taken (or not taken) by eBay management has anything to do with benefiting or protecting eBay users (buyers or sellers); eBay’s every action (or lack thereof) is purposed solely towards benefitting eBay, by whatever means, fair or foul—undoubtedly more to do with the recovery of those “lost” executive performance bonuses than with any direct consideration for shareholders—and if at any time there appears to be some benefit to eBay “users”, that will be purely coincidental.
I conclude that nothing that eBay says can be accepted at face value. All eBay statements require translation and if you interpret anything that they say as probably meaning the exact opposite of what they say you will be on petty safe ground. And if you want some more good examples, of what I refer to as eBay’s deceptive “Ho-speak,” they can be found at
this link.
Your point “(a)”: I agree with you. Been through that one over and over and over. The problem of fraudulent SCO’s (if it ever was a real problem) was solved by the general blocking of access to other users’ direct email addresses. Bidder masking never had anything to do with this supposed “problem.”
Your point “(b)”: Buyers have never been individually identified except to the seller. It seems strange to have to restate the fact that eBay’s individual user IDs are anonymous. There is no invasion of privacy. And some of us believe, anyway, that being able to track individual anonymous user IDs is a fend against shill bidding. Obviously, eBay and the shill bidding sellers disagree.
Your point “(c)”: The idea that eBay is trying to stop communications outside of the individual sale process may appear to have some merit (they certainly are now concerned about any leakage of revenue; too bad they don’t have the same consideration for the well-being of we consumers). However, I doubt that is the case because they can’t stop such communications anyway, one can always use eBay’s own messaging system. Bearing in mind that eBay has no effective customer service, you don’t imagine that they actually have a bank of little gnomes reading all the eBay messages, do you? They could possibly be filtering these messages for key words, who knows? But it certainly has nothing to do with the “privacy and protection” of eBay users.
“
eBay also said that it would hold off on making buyer email addresses anonymous in member-to-member emails.”
I saw this too. I have no idea what it means (I doubt they do either). More eBay double talk? As far as I have seen recently, direct email addresses have for some time
not been system-included in eBay messages: you have to reply via their system. Maybe I have missed something. More likely the children making the decisions at eBay simply can’t make up their minds.
Sorry, but considering all the circumstances I conclude that the only purpose served by the introduction of masked bidding aliases was the further obscuring of the shill bidding activity that now appears to be even more rampant on eBay. And, if users cannot detect, and report, same then eBay does not have to waste any of their valuable resources dealing with the problem.
Still a most unscrupulous, dare I say criminal, organisation.
