We will be making changes to the eBay User Agreement and eBay Privacy Policy effective immediately for new members and on August 13, 2008 for existing members. Below is a quick summary of the changes:

Why are we changing the User Agreement and Privacy Policy?

It’s been many years since we drafted our User Agreement and Privacy Policy. In that time, eBay has grown and changed considerably.

Over the years, our policies had become long and complex. We’ve made great progress rewriting all of eBay’s site policies to be easier to read and understand, and it was time to do the same to the User Agreement and Privacy Policy. The changes we’ve made here simplify and shorten the User Agreement and Privacy Policy; we’ve taken out language that was repeated in both documents or covered in other relevant policies. And we’ve summarized what’s left so that it’s easier to navigate the policies and find the information you seek.

We are always aware of the need to ensure that these agreements stay relevant to the current state of eBay’s sites and services. So there are also several substantive changes we needed to make. The changes are highlighted as follows:

Changes to the User Agreement

Changes to our User Agreement help us keep our legal documents consistent with the way our sites and services are evolving to better meet the needs of our user community. Here are some important ones to note:

• New Catalog Services. The agreement’s Content and Liability sections have been revised to accommodate new features that may give sellers catalogs of content and product descriptions, so they can easily include complete and up-to-date product information for the items they list.
• Late Fee Withdrawal From PayPal After 180 Days Past Due. The vast majority of our sellers settle their balances on time or before 180 days. eBay will resort to a PayPal withdrawal only after the balance has been overdue for 180 days and our other collection efforts have been unsuccessful. We believe this helps level the playing field for the rest of the sellers who pay their bills. Should eBay withdraw late fees, this will not alter the status of a seller’s PayPal account or funds remaining after the withdrawal.
• Revised Dispute Resolution. We’ve updated our dispute resolution processes, to provide a balanced, low-cost forum for the resolution of disputes on eBay that is consistent across our global eBay platforms.

Changes to the Privacy Policy.

The new Privacy Policy, like the old one, outlines the broad categories of information we collect from you, how we use this information, and what your options are with respect to the information we collect. In addition to the streamlined format, you'll notice a few substantive changes to the policy that allow us to offer new services, better tailor the services we provide, and help make our site safer.

• Combating Fraud. We're increasing our efforts to combat fraud on the site with a variety of programmes. We've made some changes that allow us to address "Ask a Question" and "My Messages" spam and other malicious activities using our message systems, or to better authenticate you if you’re using an unfamiliar computer to prevent fraudsters from abusing your account. We're also making sure our disclosures about cooperating with law enforcement allow us to respond to increasingly sophisticated fraudsters and criminals.
• Streamlining Services. We've heard your comments about how many steps it takes to complete a transaction or get customer support where multiple eBay companies are involved. We’ve made some changes to our Disclosure section that will help make your experience across all eBay platforms as seamless as we can make it. These changes will allow our Customer Support team to help you with questions that span our companies, and streamline your use of the services provided by multiple members of the eBay corporate family. Some of our new programs also mean you'll see eBay services and content in a lot of places (not just on the site), so we've made some changes to clarify where our policies apply.

Customizing Your eBay Experience. We're rolling out programmes and working with partners that help make our sites and services, and some of the ads you see on the web, more relevant and useful to you. Naturally, because we're a transparent community, we provide you with choices about these programmes. You’ll notice a new preference now available in My eBay—named AdChoice—that lets you tell us whether you want us to use the information we have about you to customize the ads you see. You'll be able to sign in and change your advertising preferences in My eBay at any time. You'll see links on the ads we serve this way, so you'll know an ad is served with the new programme and be able to set your preferences right from the ad. In some cases, we may also use information from other companies to select the right audiences for our promotions. In the revised Privacy Policy, you’ll see a new Marketing section that describes in more detail our collection and use of information for these and all our marketing programmes.

Sincerely,
The eBay Team