Our primary purpose in collecting personal information is to provide you with a safe, smooth, efficient, and customized experience. This allows us to provide services and features that most likely meet your needs, and to customize our service to make your experience safer and easier. We only collect personal information about you that we consider necessary for achieving this purpose.

In general, you can browse the Site without telling us who you are or revealing any personal information about yourself. Once you give us your personal information, you are not anonymous to us. Where possible, we indicate which fields are required and which fields are optional. You always have the option to not provide information by choosing not to use a particular service or feature.

We use data collection devices such as "cookies" on certain pages of the Site to help analyze our web page flow, measure promotional effectiveness, and promote trust and safety. "Cookies" are small files placed on your hard drive that assist us in providing our services. We offer certain features that are only available through the use of a "cookie". We also use cookies to allow you to enter your password less frequently during a session. Most cookies are "session cookies," meaning that they are automatically deleted from your hard drive at the end of a session. You are always free to decline our cookies if your browser permits, although in that case you may not be able to use certain features on the Site and you may be required to reenter your password more frequently during a session.

If you establish a credit account with us to pay the fees we charge, we collect some additional information, such as a billing address, a credit card number and a credit card expiration date and tracking information from checks or money orders.

If you choose to post messages in our message areas or leave feedback for other users, we will collect that information you provide to us. We retain this information as necessary to resolve disputes, provide customer support and troubleshoot problems as permitted by law.

If you send us personal correspondence, such as emails or letters, or if other users or third parties send us correspondence about your activities or postings on the Site, we may collect such information into a file specific to you.


 Our Use of Your Information.

We use your personal information to facilitate the services you request. We use your personal information in the file we maintain about you, and other information we obtain from your current and past activities on the Site to: resolve disputes; troubleshoot problems; help promote safe trading; collect fees owed; measure consumer interest in our products and services, inform you about online and offline offers, products, services, and updates; customize your experience; detect and protect us against error, fraud and other criminal activity; enforce our User Agreement; and as otherwise described to you at the time of collection. At times, we may look across multiple users to identify problems or resolve disputes, and in particular we may examine your personal information to identify users using multiple User IDs or aliases. We may compare and review your personal information for errors, omissions and for accuracy.

If you choose to list an item for sale on the Site or open a credit account, or otherwise provide us with your financial information, we use your address and billing information to bill you and provide associated support.

You agree that we may use personal information about you to improve our marketing and promotional efforts, to analyze site usage, improve our content and product offerings, and customize the Site's content, layout, and services. These uses improve the Site and better tailor it to meet your needs, so as to provide you with a smooth, efficient, safe and customized experience while using the Site.

You agree that we may use your personal information to contact you and deliver information to you that, in some cases, are targeted to your interests, such as administrative notices, product offerings, and communications relevant to your use of the Site. By accepting the User Agreement and Privacy Policy, you expressly agree to receive this information. If you do not wish to receive these communications, we encourage you to opt out of the receipt of certain communications on the notification preferences page. You may make changes to your notification preferences at any time.

 Our Disclosure of Your Information.

As a matter of policy, we do not sell or rent any of your personal information to third parties for their marketing purposes without your explicit consent. However, the following describes some of the ways that your personal information may be disclosed in the normal scope of business to provide our services.


Community. Your User ID is displayed throughout the Site and is therefore available to the public. All of your activities on the Site will be identifiable to your User ID. Therefore, if you associate your name with your User ID, the people you have revealed your name to will be able to personally identify your activities. Although our pages are coded with robot exclusion headers, others may illegally attempt to automatically collect your email address from the Site. Further, we may send out notices to you or other community members regarding suspicious activity or policy violations on the Site.

(External Service Providers.)

Internal Service Providers for Our Operations. We may use third parties that we refer to as internal service providers to facilitate or outsource one or more aspects of the business, product and service operations that we provide to you (e.g., search technology, discussion boards, bill collection, affiliate and rewards programs, co-branded credit cards) and therefore we may provide some of your personal information directly to these internal service providers. These internal service providers' are subject to confidentiality agreements with us and other legal restrictions that prohibit their use of the information we provide them for any other purpose except to facilitate the specific outsourced operation, unless you have explicitly agreed or given your prior permission to them for additional uses. In some instances, the internal service provider may collect information directly from you (such as for eBay surveys or for a co-branded credit card). In these cases, you will be notified of the involvement of the internal service provider, and all additional information you provide them and their additional uses will be strictly up to you. If you provide additional information to an internal service provider directly, then their use of your personal information is governed by their applicable privacy policy.

Other Corporate Entities. We share much of our data, including personal information about you, with our subsidiaries and joint ventures that are committed to serving your online trading needs and related services, throughout the world. To the extent that these entities have access to your information, they will treat it at least as protectively as they treat information they obtain from their other users. Our subsidiaries and joint ventures follow privacy practices no less protective of all users than our practices described in this document, to the extent allowed by applicable law. eStarBurst, its joint ventures, or any combination of such, will share some or all of your personal information with another business entity should we plan to, merge with, or be acquired by that business entity. Should such a combination occur, we will require that the new combined entity follow this privacy policy with respect to your personal information. If your personal information will be used contrary to this policy, you will receive prior notice in as provided in Section 12 ("Notice").

Legal Requests. We cooperate with law enforcement inquiries, as well as other third parties to enforce laws, such as: intellectual property rights, fraud and other rights, to help protect you and the our community from bad actors. In an effort to respect your privacy and our ability to keep the community free from bad actors, we will not otherwise disclose your personal information to law enforcement or other government officials without a subpoena, court order or substantially similar legal procedure, except when we believe in good faith that the disclosure of information is necessary to: prevent imminent physical harm or financial loss; or report suspected illegal activity.

Due to the existing regulatory environment, we cannot ensure that all of your private communications and other personal information will never be disclosed in ways not otherwise described in this Privacy Policy. By way of example (without limiting the foregoing), we may be forced to disclose personal information to the government or third parties under certain circumstances, third parties may unlawfully intercept or access transmissions or private communications, or users may abuse or misuse your personal information that they collect from the Site. Therefore, although we use industry standard practices to protect your privacy, we do not promise, and you should not expect, that your personal information or private communications will always remain private.