Just getting around to reading this now. Thanks for the interesting read, Alexander. Frightening implications, though I'm not sure I buy 100% of it. The part about them keeping track of everything everyone has bought and sold since the beginning, for instance. To be able to really use it, they'd have to store not just the title, but the full item description (since the two can greatly differ). Add to that the learning curve eBay itself has had to go through -- I remember when people were selling firearms, human parts and body fluids, all manner of screwed-up stuff, before the site started cracking down. If they kept such meticulous records why didn't they do something about such auctions sooner? Considering their current incompetence I just can't swallow the notion of them having that much foresight. Plus when you factor in the storage requirements, 8+ years of full auction text for X million users, for a site that has 2-3 billion auctions running at any given time. It just seems awfully far-fetched to me.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Alexander Zöller" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Monday, September 29, 2003 9:58 AM Subject: [SWCollect] Big Brother is watching you - and documenting (the eBay/PayPal merger) > Longer article taken from the online edition of Haaretz, Israel's leading > daily newspaper. IMHO well worth reading. > > /Alexander ---------------------------------------------------------------------- This message was sent to you because you are currently subscribed to the swcollect mailing list. To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of 'unsubscribe swcollect' Archives are available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
