EBay Should Protect Your Privacy Better

In the past, I wrote about a naive Amazon user creating an account with my password and making me privy to lots of private information at https://medium.com/@shinmaikeru/amazon-security-and-the-reluctant-stalker-e9e4b94a0777#.zew8nwmle. I contacted Amazon. They did nothing, so I sent the user a letter. Yes, a paper letter. I know it sounds stupid, but being a good citizen is important to me.

Now EBay is worse.

I have been receiving real invoices from EBay for girl’s clothes, so to be sure they were not spoofs, I used “Forgot my password” and entered the account. It is real. The user is still buying stuff but never receives the emails because the user cannot login to my email account. I looked for an email address so that I could ask EBay to cancel the account or inform the user, but EBay offers no way to contact them directly other than by phone, and I am not wasting a holiday and international phone charges on this. So I try to cancel the account. I can’t because the user has not paid some vendors and has unresolved purchases.

So if you work for EBay and you see this, request number one is, “Confirm user email addresses when accounts are created.” Same goes for you, Amazon. If you are just running a newsletter, a mistakenly-typed address means some random person clicks “Unsubscribe” after receiving the first email, but EBay, you are an auction site for buying and selling, and you are not confirming that user emails actually belong to the users.

Request number two is, “Give users an email address or live chat to contact you for support.” I should not have to pay for a phone call to request that you fix your mistakes.