eBay now tracking your computer

Under the guise of "Protecting sellers and buyers from identity theft", from 21^st April 2008 internet auction site eBay will now not only track users but the users computers as well by tagging and identifying (and permanently logging) them. Since websites like eBay already do log browser header information and have done for years, such as the following:

Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Connection: keep-alive
Host: www.ebay.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.12) Gecko/20080208 Mandriva/PCLinuxOS/2.0.0.12-1pclos2007 (2007) Firefox/2.0.0.12
Cookie: perm=q3ovpscvsc11b; temp=rv2an3sd5zhwp
Content-Length: 30
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 23000
FirstParty: http://www.ebay.com
ThirdParty: http://www.ebay.co.uk
Secure: https://www.ebay.co.uk
Nonsecure: http://www.ebay.co.uk
Session: td2mbmk5rqo3h

One wonders what else they will be logging and why....

They say :

"We'd like to let you know about some new steps we're taking to help prevent fraudulent unauthorised activity on eBay accounts.

From today, we'll start noting the computers you regularly use when buying and selling on eBay. We'll use a combination of cookies and Flash objects to link your user ID with the computer you're using. This data is encrypted and can only be read by eBay. It doesn't include any contact information or details of eBay transactions.

So, if it doesn't include contact information how will they tie it to your account?. And if it doesn't include details of transactions how will they know what you are listing or bidding on?. In other words how will they know if your account is being accessed fraudulently or not?.

They continue :

Later this year, we'll begin checking the computer you use to list an item to see whether it's one of the computers you regularly use. To confirm that it's really you when you list an item using a different computer (e.g. at a friend's house, in a hotel, at the library), we'll lead you through a simple automated process where we call a phone number on your account. We might also prompt you to verify your identity in other ways".

"We'd like to let you know about some new steps we're taking to help prevent fraudulent unauthorised activity on eBay accounts".

If you believe that I have some nice Parkland real estate in Berkshire for sale.

Pip pip