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Privacy Policy
Welcome to the privacy policy ("Privacy Policy") for eBay.co.uk. The services available at https://www.ebay.co.uk are provided by eBay International A.G. ("eBay", "we", "us" or "our") located at Helvetiastrasse 15/17, 3005 Bern, Switzerland.
Your privacy is very important to us. Please read this Privacy Policy to learn about the ways in which we use and protect your personal information. If you have additional questions about eBay's general privacy principles, please either read the pages at our Privacy Central section available or contact Customer Support.
This Privacy Policy applies from 9 December 2003 for new registering users and applies from 8 January 2004 for all users registered prior to 9 December 2003.
Overview
By accepting this Privacy Policy and the User Agreement, you expressly consent to our use and disclosure of your personal information in the manner prescribed in this Privacy Policy. If you object to this use and disclosure please do not register with us.
This Privacy Policy contains a number of references to other pages on our Site and other websites. Please note: underlined words and phrases are click-through links to these pages and websites. eBay strongly recommends that you click on such links to obtain further important details about the Privacy Policy, as they may contain further terms and conditions which apply to you as an eBay member.
Please note that your Information will be stored and processed on our computers in the United States. The laws on holding personal data in the United States may be less stringent than the laws applicable to the UK but eBay will hold and transmit your information in a safe, confidential and secure environment. eBay will never sell or rent your personal information to third parties for their marketing purposes without your explicit consent.
This Privacy Policy applies to the www.ebay.co.uk website (the "Site"). All other eBay websites worldwide operate under similar privacy practices as described in this Privacy Policy and, subject to the requirements of applicable local law, we strive to provide a consistent set of privacy practices throughout the global eBay trading community. Their specific privacy policies are available from our Privacy Central pages but where inconsistent, this Privacy Policy takes precedence.
Contents
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1.
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An Important Note About Children.
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Our services are not available to children and we ask that persons under the age of 18 do not submit any personal information to us. If you are under 18 years old, you can use this service only in conjunction with and under the supervision of a parent or guardian.
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2.
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Information We Collect.
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Our primary goal in collecting personal information is to provide you with a safe, efficient, and personalised experience. We only collect personal information about you that we consider necessary for this purpose.
In general, you can browse the Site without telling us who you are or revealing any personal information about yourself. Once you give us your personal information, you are not anonymous to us. If you choose to use our services, we may require you to provide contact and identity information, financial information and other personal information as indicated on the forms throughout the Site. Where possible, we indicate which fields are required and which fields are optional. You always have the option not to provide information by choosing not to use a particular service or feature.
Under some circumstances we may require some additional financial information, such as, but not limited to, credit card details if you are registering using an email account at certain email services, or registering to sell on the Site. We use this financial information to help verify your name, address, and other information. We may also use this information to charge you for your use of our services as further described in our Fees and Credits Policy.
We automatically collect and process certain information based upon your use of the Site. We use this information to conduct internal research on our users' demographics, interests, and behaviour to better understand, serve and protect you and our community. This information may include the URL that you just came from (whether this URL is on the Site or not), which URL you next go to (whether this URL is on the Site or not), browser information, and your IP address.
We use data collection devices such as "cookies" on certain pages of the Site. "Cookies" are small files placed on your hard drive that assist us in providing customised services and to help promote safer trading. We also offer certain features that are only available through the use of a cookie. We also use cookies to allow you to enter your password less frequently while you are using the Site. Cookies can also help us provide information which we tailor to your interests. (For more information about why we use cookies, please see https://pages.ebay.co.uk/help/myinfo/cookies.html.) Most cookies are "session cookies", meaning that they are automatically deleted from your hard drive at the end of a session using the Site. You are always free to decline our cookies if your browser permits, although in that case you may not be able to use certain features on the Site and you may be required to re-enter your password more frequently while you are using the Site.
Additionally, you may encounter "cookies" or other similar devices on certain pages of the Site that are placed by third parties. For example, if you view a web page created by a user, there may be a "cookie" placed within that web page. We do not control the use of cookies by third parties.
If you choose to bid, buy or sell on the Site, we collect information about your bidding, buying and selling behaviour. We also collect other users' comments about you in our feedback area.
If you establish a credit account with us to pay the fees we charge, we collect some additional information, including but not limited to a billing address, a credit card number and a credit card expiration date.
If you choose to post messages on our community boards, chat rooms or other message areas or leave feedback for other users, we will collect that information.
If you send us personal correspondence, such as emails or letters, or if other users or third parties send us correspondence about your activities or postings on the Site, we may collect such information into a file specific to you.
If you register for eBay (a) on another web site, or (b) use a web site providing a service for eBay, or (c) a web site that helps facilitate your activity on eBay, that web site may provide personal information about you and your transactions back to eBay.
For a chart showing what information we collect from or about you, and who has access to that information, please see the Appendix.
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3.
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Our Use of Your Information.
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We use information in the files we maintain about you, and other information we obtain from your current and past activities on the Site, to resolve disputes, provide customer support, troubleshoot problems and enforce our User Agreement and policies. At times, we may look across multiple users to identify problems or resolve disputes, and in particular we may examine your information to identify users using multiple User IDs or aliases.
You agree that we may use personally identifiable information about you to improve our marketing and promotional efforts, to analyze site usage, improve our content and product offerings, and customise the Site's content, layout, and services. These uses improve the Site and better tailor it to meet your needs.
You agree that we may use your information to contact you and deliver information to you that, in some cases, are targeted to your interests, such as targeted banner advertisements, administrative notices, product offerings, and communications relevant to your use of the Site. By accepting the User Agreement and reading this Privacy Policy, you expressly agree to receive this information. If you do not wish to receive these communications, we encourage you to amend the communications option on the Notification Preferences page You may make changes to your notification preferences at any time.
If you send an email using the Email This Auction to a Friend service to an email address that is not registered in our community, we do not use that email addresses for any purpose other than to send your email. We do not rent or sell these email addresses. We generally discard the email addresses some time after they have been used to send your email.
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4.
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Our Disclosure of Your Information.
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As a matter of policy, eBay will never sell or rent your personal information to third parties for their marketing purposes without your explicit consent. However, the following describes some of the ways that we may disclose your personally identifiable information.
(a) Advertisers. We aggregate (gather up data across all user accounts) personally identifiable information and disclose such information in a non-personally identifiable manner to advertisers and other third parties for other marketing and promotional purposes. However, in these situations, we do not disclose to these entities any information that could be used to identify you personally. Certain information, such as your name, email address, password, credit card number, and bank account number are never disclosed to third party advertisers.
Your User ID is displayed throughout the Site and is therefore available to the public. All of your activities on the Site will be identifiable to your User ID. Other people can see your bids, items that you have purchased in the past, your feedback rating and associated comments, your postings on the Site, and so on. Therefore, if you associate your name with your User ID, the people you have revealed your name to will be able to personally identify your eBay activities. Although our pages are coded with robot exclusion headers, individuals and corporations may illegally attempt to automatically collect your email address from the Site. We describe how to change your User ID below in Section 6. We also provide a number of ways to allow other users to find out more about you and your activities on the Site, such as our feature that allows users to see all of the items you are offering at the time. If you are involved in a transaction, we have a feature that allows other users to view your email address and obtain your contact information and postal address to help complete the transaction. Further, we may send out notices to you or other community members regarding suspicious activity or policy violations on the Site.
(c) External Service Providers. There are a number of separate optional services offered by third parties that we refer to as external service providers that may be complimentary to your use of the Site (e.g., co-branded sites, listing agents, escrow and mediation). If you choose to use these optional services, and in the course of doing so, disclose information to the external service providers, and/or grant them permission to collect information about you, then their use of your information is governed by their privacy policy. We do not disclose your personal information to external service providers unless you provide your explicit consent. To prevent our disclosure of your personally identifiable information to an external service provider, you can decline such consent or simply not use their services. Because we do not control the privacy practices of these third parties, you should evaluate their practices before deciding to use their services.
(d) Internal Service Providers. We may use third parties that we refer to as internal service providers to facilitate or outsource one or more elements of our services (e.g., search, identity verification, discussion boards, surveys, affiliate and reward programmes) and therefore we may provide some of your personally identifiable information directly to them. These internal service providers' are subject to confidentiality agreements with us and other legal restrictions that prohibit their use of the information we provide them for any other purpose except to facilitate the specific outsourced eBay related operation, unless you have explicitly agreed or given your prior permission to them for additional uses. In some instances, the internal service provider may collect information directly from you (such as the situation where we ask a internal service provider to conduct a survey for us). In these cases, you will be notified of the involvement of the internal service provider, and all information disclosures you make will be strictly optional. If you provide additional information to an internal service provider directly, then their use of your information is governed by their applicable privacy policy.
(e) Other Corporate Entities. You agree that we may share personally identifiable information about you with our parent, affiliates, subsidiaries and joint ventures that are committed to serving your online trading needs and related services, throughout the world. Our parent, affiliates, subsidiaries and joint ventures follow privacy practices no less protective of all users than our practices described in this Privacy Policy, to the extent allowed by applicable law. It is possible that eBay, its subsidiaries, its joint ventures, or any combination of such, could merge with or be acquired by another business entity. Should such a combination occur, you should expect and agree that that eBay may share some or all of your information in order to continue to provide the service. You will receive notice of such event (to the extent it occurs) as provided in Section 9 ("Notice") and we will require that the new combined entity follow the practices disclosed in this Privacy Policy.
(f) Legal Requests. eBay cooperates with law enforcement inquiries, as well as other third parties, to enforce laws and third party rights, such as intellectual property rights and laws relating to fraud. Therefore, in response to a verified request by law enforcement or other government officials such as a Section 29 (3) Data Protection Act 1998 form relating to a criminal investigation or alleged illegal activity, or other activity that may expose us or you to legal liability, we can (and you authorise us to) disclose personal information such as name, address, telephone number, email address, User ID history, and bidding and listing history about you as we, in our sole discretion, believe necessary or appropriate. Further, we can (and you authorise us to) disclose your User ID, name, address, telephone number, email address, and company name to eBay VeRO Programme participants under a confidentiality agreement as we in our sole discretion believe necessary or appropriate in connection with an investigation of fraud, intellectual property infringement or other unlawful activity.
We cannot ensure that all of your communications with eBay and other personally identifiable information will never be disclosed in ways not otherwise described in this Privacy Policy. For example, third parties may unlawfully intercept or access transmissions or private communications, or users may abuse or misuse your information that they collect from the Site. Therefore, although we use industry standard practices to protect your privacy, we do not promise, and you should not expect, that your personally identifiable information or communications with eBay will always remain private.
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5.
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Control of Your Password.
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You are responsible for all actions taken with your User ID and password, including those actions that result in fees being charged to your account. Therefore we do not recommend that you disclose your eBay password to any third parties. If you choose to share your User ID and password or your information with third parties to where it is necessary for you to do so for them to provide you additional services, you are responsible for all actions taken with your User ID and password and therefore you should review that third party's privacy policy. If you lose control of your password, you may lose substantial control over your personally identifiable information and may be subject to legally binding actions taken on your behalf. Therefore, if your password or account has been compromised for any reason, you should immediately change your password as detailed in Section 6 below.
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Accessing, Reviewing and Changing Your Personally Identifiable Information.
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We offer you the ability to automatically review and change the information you submit to us by logging into the Site and entering in the new information yourself. Generally, we will not modify your personal information based on your request because it is very difficult to authenticate your account manually. You can change your User ID, password, contact information, financial information, postal address and user preferences by going the "preferences" section in My eBay. You must promptly update your personal information if it changes or is inaccurate. Once posted, you may not be able to change or remove any public postings made on the Site including our chat rooms or other message areas or the feedback area.
Upon your written request, we will deactivate your account, contact information, and financial information from our active databases. To make this request, please contact Customer Support. Such information will be deactivated as soon as reasonably possible in accordance with our deactivation policy and applicable law.
We will retain in our files information you have requested to remove in some circumstances, such as to resolve disputes, troubleshoot problems and enforce our User Agreement. Further, such prior information is never completely removed from our databases due to technical and legal constraints, including stored "back up" systems. Therefore, you should not expect that all of your personally identifiable information will be completely removed from our databases in response to your requests.
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Other Information Collectors.
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Except as otherwise expressly included in this Privacy Policy, this document only addresses the use and disclosure of information we collect from you. To the extent that you disclose your information to other parties, whether they are bidders, buyers or sellers on the Site or other sites throughout the Internet, different rules may apply to their use or disclosure of the information you disclose to them. To the extent that we use third party advertisers, they adhere to their own privacy policies. Since eBay does not control the privacy policies of third parties, you are subject to the privacy policies of that third party. We encourage you to ask questions before you disclose your personal information to others.
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Security.
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eBay uses industry standard practices to safeguard the confidentiality of your personal identifiable information, including encryption, "firewalls" and Secure Socket Layers. eBay treats data as an asset that must be protected against loss and unauthorised access. We employ many different security techniques to protect such data from unauthorised access by users inside and outside the company. However, "perfect security" does not exist on the Internet.
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9.
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Notice.
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We may amend this Privacy Policy from time to time in order that it accurately reflects the regulatory environment and our own data collection and disclosure practices. All amended terms shall automatically be effective 30 days after they are initially posted on the Site. In addition, we will notify you in accordance with your Notification Preferences or by posting the amended Privacy Policy on the Site.
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