For me, nothing but full transparency is acceptable. Many people won't bid at all over $200, so eBay is shooting itself in the foot when they won't let us see whom we are bidding against.

However, "For any given member, this masked ID will be consistent across all auctions over $200 for which they place bids." That's better than nothing; not much better, though.

My question would be if you can search on that anonymous ID and find those other bids?

You can't perform a Search by Bidder using the masked user ID either.

If we are ever going to have any transparency returned, eBay will have to implement real security, effective user validation, and secure and monitor the API traffic and messages between users. Unfortunately eBay will probably have to continue and even expand the use of "anonymized" bidder IDs for ALL auctions in order to break the link that has been established and enabled by the irresponsible release of bidder personal email information to sellers and scammers via inadequate security and the eBay API.

If they can do the job of securing the site, even if user id's are "anonymized", they could return the search by bidder tools and transparency where you could click on the "anonymized" bidder ID and see all of his past and current activity.

I don't really need to know someone's real eBay ID if I can still see his bidding activity. I don't know or need to know Tiptie (795) from t***i (795) but if I can easily search for what t**i (795) is or has been bidding on and know that eBay has at least made a cursory attempt to validate the user IDs to link a real person to the ID, I can feel much more comfortable that he is actually a real bidder.

Certainly scammers and criminals could jump through the hoops, get verified and blend in to the community to gain access to the same information that honest eBayers have. However with an effective verification mechanism, most scammers will not be able to qualify and many who don't want to be verified and held responsible for their activities will drop out. And of course there will always be issues with hijacked accounts. All issues can be addressed and effective changes made but I doubt that eBay is willing to do what is necessary to really protect it's users.

With true verification of user identities and internally linking user's multiple accounts to the real person who can be held responsible for his activities, eBay could begin to regain control of the site from the scammers. They could throw out scamming users who demonstrate that will not follow to the user agreement and in cases of blatant fraud, eBay could also forward evidence to the appropriate authorities for prosecution.

Using secure login combined with cookies, IP and ISP tracking and perhaps a security device / dongle could be employed to verify that the user logging in is really who he purports to be. To reduce hijacked accounts while allowing users to be able to access their account from other ISP or IP addresses, when login is detected from a different ISP or IP, a series of security questions could be used to verify user identity.

While nothing will ever eliminate shill bidding, with secure login, positively identifying users and internally linking all IDs to a real person would allow eBay to more effectively prevent and detect the really stupid shill bidders. With a return to transparency we could again see suspicious patterns to report the ones shilling using multiple people and IDs. IMO, anyone caught shilling should be permanently removed from the site and prosecuted.

Secure login and positively identifying the listing party combined with scanning all new listings for illegal links and malicious code could prevent many of the fraudulent listings from ever going live.

Securing all pages to prevent scraping and parsing of identity information and monitoring and tracking API access could stop much of the illegal access and data mining being done to gather information to initiate fraud.

Tracking and monitoring all communication between members and eliminating public email as a means for doing business here would eliminate much of the fraudulent emails that target ignorant users for off site transactions and phishing. That would require an efficient and secure messaging system be developed and implemented to bring all communication on site. Make it known that ANY email to your off site email address is fraudulent.

Even if eBay were to implement these draconian changes, I seriously doubt that eBay will ever be able to roll back SMI to return to showing real eBay IDs as in the good old days. With the past careless handling of our eBay IDs and the linked email addresses and the resulting public lists of those links it will likely require even expanding "anonymized" IDS to every auction across the site.

To return transparency and still break the link to user IDs and email addresses, a separate "public" ID may need to be assigned to each user to allow a return of full search by bidder. At that point eBay should NEVER give out eBay IDs or email addresses to ANYONE, not even sellers. There should be no need for anyone to have that information so no one could make the link to send out targeted fake SCOs and we could have a return to transparency.

I expect much resistance to user verification from eBay and many users. EBay certainly doesn't want to reduce the super inflated user counts that it uses to boost share prices and management bonuses. I'm also sure that if they implement real security measures that many fear that they might lose their precious "its only a venue" defense.

We shall persevere.

Thanks tiptie...

Actually I think the word "caused" is not the correct word.

this business model was naive and has caused enabled much of the fraud that plagues eBay today.

Surely knowing that these issues enable much of the fraud on their unsuspecting users, eBay will diligently work to correct these security issues to really protect their users and not be complicit in the fraud.

Wayy back in 1999 when I first started selling my baseball cards on ebay. I had to use my dad's credit card to open an account. Why don't they require that anymore?

If eBay would go further and mail a login key device to the address given and require it be used rather than just a regular login, that would also help a lot.

Never gonna happen nor should it. eBay already has the security key available but if they make it mandatory their business would plummet. It's just too big an inconvenience having to have the key fob with you every time you want to use eBay. It also would mean you would have to wait a few days before you could start using eBay. And the cost of sending the key fob to every one of the millions of users would be extreme. And of course all of the sniping services would go out of business though I think eBay would count that as a plus.