These questions started to run through my mind one day a week ago, after I had purchased a movie DVD on Ebay. I 'won' the 'benefit' of being allowed to buy the DVD from the seller. I clicked the Pay Now button on Ebay, at which point I was redirected to another web site which I am not familiar with. What I saw on the seller's fourth-party website, was that the site required me to type in a lot of private information. The web form at this fourth party site wanted data which I have not given out to other sellers on ebay before, such as my home phone number and other private data which had proven unnecessary for other previous purchases and sales at Ebay. I am both a seller on ebay, as well as a buyer, and as a seller I have never needed any of a buyer's private information beyond what Ebay and Paypal themselves have already provided to the seller. Furthermore this site's information privacy policy link existed, but strangely enough, there was no page there: Clicking the link merely redirected my browser to the home page of the site. That did it for me -- I began to think twice about typing in all my private information into that fishy -- or shall I call it phishy – fourth-party website.

I wonder how valuable the additional private information of a buyer really is. Could the private information be valuable enough for such fourth-party websites, to resell? I do not know about these fourth-party "seller tool" systems. What I do know is, some of the "seller tool" systems appear to be absent any sort of clear, uniform and before-the-purchase customer information privacy policy. For all I know my private information as a buyer would soon be resold to internet spammers, sourcing from the buyer databases of these fourth-party web systems.

Then I used Google and it turned up something interesting. I gleaned some idea about the spirit of Ebay's anti-spam, anti-private-information-selling policy from a document hosted by the New Zealand government:

"As an overview, eBay does not rent or sell any personal information about its users to any

third party, nor does it authorize users to make use of eBay features to send spam. See Privacy

Policy, Use of Email Tools, at . These

WARNING: If anybody thinks software and music and movies are the only things protected to the fullest extent of the law, check this: This citizen is protected by domestic law, international treaties, and constitutions. This citizen, and all men globally, are born with inalienable rights. To protect these rights, men created government. Those who create, can also uncreate, as needed. Now, can your movie do this?

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