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Originally Posted by ebayaintstupid (Post 187)

there are obviously things that EBAY is doing that are not covered here.

First of all, volume triggers alerts in EBAY. So if you start a new account and within three months you are doing heavy volume, EBAY will likely be looking real close. It has been recommended you limit yourself to one account at a time, but you really need to split accounts up if you plan on doing any volume at all without later suspension, at least in the first year or so. Plus you are planting seeds for later. You have to be careful as possible to not get the accounts linked.

IP Address is only one way that they can track you, and it isn't incredibly reliable. Why? Some ISPs have thousands of customers and for a given area may broadcast the same IP Address for thousands of folks. Many corporate IDs are the same. Company I work at now has thousands of computers. They all show up as a single IP Address to the outside world. I use whatsmyipaddress.com on my PC at work and then go look on one of the servers in the lab for the other floor on a different subnet in a different part of the building, bingo, both the same.

So EBAY can't link you solely based on IP Adress, they need something more. Yup cookies. Obvious, right? Now, you say, OK, I am real cookie careful. I clean up all the time. But one innocent miss is deadly. If a cookie is around when a hit on your IP Address happens and you are identified as a different EBAY user than the last time that cookie was seen, you are linked. It is possible for Ann and Dan to have the same IP Address and have no association whatsoever. But if Ann has Dan's cookies, well, there is almost no chance they aren't associated. If you got linked to a suspended account, you got suspended. Dead.

Aspkin says smartly to never log back into a suspended account. Of course, you really can, so long as you clean up your cookie trail and NEVER forget, but it is risky. You could get caught off guard.

Now, how could you get caught off guard? Beacons. If you don't know what a beacon is, go find out. They are an insidious invasion of privacy used by marketers. They are why GMAIL and some other mailers block all images unless you specifically allow them. You open an email with a beacon and you don't have them blocked, and guess what. Read about beacons and you will get it immediately.

Let's just say, EBAY is a marketer. Beacons are a way of life for all internet marketers. And Beacons combined with a cookie trail are deadly to anyone trying to hide from the EBAY monster. And I have spoken to well educated and very experienced internet engineers, and even many of them have no idea what a beacon is.

Beacons are a total invasion of privacy and should be banned and made illegal. But marketers are discussing now how to get you to open emails with beacons despite the new gmail and other mailers blocking them. How to make them beckon you to click "Allow Images" when you open your mail. And each time you do. Someone knows you are there.

If you have other suggestions or ideas for how to evade EBAY, or questions regarding beacons, post them here. I would love to see some more folks' thoughts.

Aspkin got me thinking. EBAY got me mad.

Originally Posted by penny (Post 14927)

I have read this entire thread, but I am still confused...
I use yahoo for all of my ebay accounts.
I am using a computer with a suspended IP address, but I no longer log into ebay from it. I go to the library or kinkos to log into ebay and I use auctiva.
My question is: If I read the emails sent to me by ebay in yahoo from home (never clicking respond here or anything), they can tell that I am on a suspended IP just by them sending me an email and me opening it?:confused:

Originally Posted by Modee (Post 28915)

If you read this thread carefully, you'll know that index.dat files are not an EWAY-linking issue. Again, if they were, all of us but the most paranoid would never have sustained an account for long.

Originally Posted by Modee (Post 29093)

I will admit - most anything's possible. But the EBAY employee we had on here for a while went into detail as to what they do, and do not, use to link accounts. And on his list there was nothing to do with index.dat files or web beacons.