This section contains important additional information about the protection of personal data in connection with the use of our Services, including whether you are required to provide personal data.
What happens when you share your personal data on our sites or applications?
Other users have access to the information you share on eBay or disclose to other users. For example, other users can see your bids, purchases, items for sale, saved interests, sellers and searches, storefronts, feedback, ratings, product reviews and associated comments. Other users can also see any information you choose to share in your profile. In some regions, applicable law may require us to display or otherwise make available certain seller or trader information, such as a seller's name, business address, telephone number or other legally required seller details.
When you use our Services, your public username may be displayed and available to the public and associated with all of your public eBay activity. Notices sent to other users about suspicious activity and notice violations on our sites may refer to your public username and specific items. Accordingly, if you use a username that allows others to identify you, these others may be able to identify your eBay activities.
To help protect your personal data, we allow only limited access to other users' contact, shipping and financial information as necessary to facilitate your transactions, collect payments, and comply with legal requirements. However, when users are involved in a transaction, they have access to each other's name, username, (alias) email address and other contact and shipping information. For example, we may allow users to exchange telephone numbers in order to contact each other prior to completing a transaction (e.g. a seller may opt to share their telephone number with a buyer so that the buyer may call with questions about a listed item). In this case, sellers are prohibited from using a buyer's telephone number for other purposes (e.g. completing a transaction off eBay or adding the buyer to a marketing list).
Use of our Services through third-party applications
If you use our Services from within a third-party application, that application may also collect your data in accordance with their separate privacy policies. When accessing our Services from a web browser within a third-party application (e.g. Facebook's in-app browser), you should also review that application's privacy policy for information about the application's processing of your personal data.
Your responsibilities over transactional information you receive through eBay
When you complete a transaction with another user (or a transaction has been canceled, failed, or subsequently invalidated), we will provide you with the other user's personal data (such as name, username, (alias) email address, contact information, shipping and billing information, or return address). Independent from us, you are the controller of such data and responsible for any processing that you perform after we have shared this data with you, including compliance with any limitations imposed by this User Privacy Notice and our User Agreement.
Unless you act for purely personal purposes, we recommend that you explain your data processing activities in your own privacy notice and protect the privacy of other users. As a seller, you must in any case comply with the applicable data protection laws and in particular protect the rights of other users as data subjects, e.g. give them the opportunity to access the personal data collected by you and demand that it be erased.
You may only use the personal data that you have access to for eBay transaction-related purposes, or for other Services offered through eBay (such as shipping, fraud complaints, and member-to-member communications), and for purposes expressly consented by the user to whom the data relates. Using personal data of other users that you have access to for any other purpose, such as adding them to a mailing list without their express consent, constitutes a violation of our User Agreement.
Personal data relating to third parties
If you provide us with personal data relating to another person, you must obtain the consent of this person or the disclosure of the data to us must be otherwise legally permissible. You must inform the other person of how we process personal data in accordance with our User Privacy Notice.
Filtering and safety review of messages and other content sent via our tools
All messages sent via our messaging tools (including chat messages and emails sent to eBay alias email addresses) are first received by us and then forwarded to the recipient.
We use automated systems and, where appropriate, human review to detect, prevent, and address content and behavior that may violate our User Agreement, policies, or applicable law. This may also apply to messages, listings, images, videos, livestreams, comments, reactions, transcripts, captions, reports, and other user-generated content shared through our Services. In the event of a violation of our User Agreement (including any of our rules and policies), we reserve the right to block the transmission of the message, remove or restrict access to other content, restrict the purchase and sales functions of your eBay account, block your eBay account, or otherwise enforce our policies.
To protect our users, our Services, and our legitimate business interests, we may limit the level of detail we provide about our detection, moderation, and enforcement systems, including where disclosure could enable circumvention, undermine the effectiveness of our safeguards, or expose trade secrets or security-sensitive information.
This is to protect our legitimate interests such as protecting against fraudulent or suspicious activities (e.g. spam, viruses, phishing, or other illegal activities) or enforcing our User Agreement and our other rules and policies (e.g. illegal and other prohibited content), including but not limited to enforcing the prohibition of purchases and sales outside of eBay.
Are you obliged to provide your personal data to us?
Some of the personal data that you provide to us (e.g. data by which we can identify you) are required to enter into the User Agreement and the Payments Terms of Use and/or to comply with legal obligations. For example, under the Payments Terms of Use you must provide us with certain identification information including legal name, date of birth, and tax identification number or social security number so that we may fulfill our legal "Know Your Customer" (KYC) obligations. As described in our User Privacy Notice and in the Payments Terms of Use, we may share this data with other eBay Affiliates in order to facilitate transactions and with service providers, including payment processors, credit agencies and bureaus. Although the provision of any other personal data (e.g. address and shipping data) is voluntary, it may be necessary for the use of our Services, such as bidding, purchase and sales data to complete a transaction.
Children's privacy
Our services are not intended for use by children. We do not knowingly collect personal data from users who are considered children under applicable laws. Under our User Agreement, children are not permitted to use our Services.
Staying signed in
When you sign into your account on our Services, we give you the option to stay signed into your account for a certain amount of time. If you are using a public or shared computer, we encourage you to decline. You or any other user of the computer/browser you signed in on will be able to view and access most parts of your account and take certain specific actions during this signed in period without any further authorization. The specific actions and account activities that you or any other user of this computer/browser may take include:
- Bid, buy or make an offer on an item
- Check out or add items to your cart
- Purchase an item with PayPal using Faster Checkout (if enabled in your account)
- View the activity header
- View the My eBay page
- View or edit the Watchlist or order details
- View the profile page
- Send member-to-member messages
- Conduct after-sale activities, like leaving feedback, canceling orders, requesting returns or submitting claims
If you attempt to change your password or username, update any other account information or attempt other account activity beyond those listed above, you may be required to enter your password.
You can typically end your signed in session by either signing out and/or clearing your cookies. If you have certain browser privacy settings enabled, simply closing your browser may also end your signed in session. If you are using a public or shared computer, you should sign out and/or clear your cookies when you are done using our Services to protect your account and your personal data.
Blockchain and controllership
Certain features in our marketplace may enable tokens, smart contracts, and/or other digital assets (e.g. immutable tokens for eBay Authenticity Certificates) to be deployed to a public blockchain with your separate agreement to certain terms and conditions. Please note that notwithstanding other provisions in this User Privacy Notice addressing data controllership, the blockchain is an inherently public and decentralized infrastructure that cannot be controlled by any one person or group and is therefore outside of our ability to control. For example, details of blockchain-based transactions are immutable and cannot be deleted by any one person or group.
To the extent that certain Services involve personal data processed on eBay websites or applications such as through account or wallet registration, customer service interactions, or marketing activities, one of the eBay Affiliates is responsible for the processing of your personal data depending on the region in which you reside (see section "Controllers, data protection officers and privacy contacts"). Such eBay Affiliate is also the controller for its independent activities involving your personal data on the blockchain to verify and manage risk involving digital wallets or to enable features for brands, collectors, sellers, traders, or such eBay Affiliate for user engagement or marketing purposes. By contrast, neither eBay Inc. nor an eBay Affiliate is the controller for activities you choose to conduct via the blockchain, publicly visible digital wallets, or other decentralized networks (e.g. which allow you to engage in transactions on public blockchains and which inherently involve personal data placed on the public blockchain ledger). In addition, we may engage third-party partners who may act as independent data controllers to assist to facilitate transactions you request, and your interactions with that third-party partner as an independent data controller are governed by the applicable terms of service and privacy policy of that third party.
