eBay: New privacy policy allows AI training with personal data
The new privacy policy allows the platform to use personal user data such as marital status to improve its service.
(Image: Shutterstock/Anton Gvozdikov)
With its new privacy policy, the eBay platform has secured the right to use personal data to train its own AI models. According to eBay, this will enable it to improve its service and offer users new functions.
Among other things, AI-supported offer creation, AI-generated summaries of product reviews and real-time chat responses are to be offered. The user data collected could be used for this purpose, but this does not necessarily have to be the case, according to the privacy policy.
"To the extent permitted by applicable law, we use personal data that we have collected from our users to train, test, validate and tune our own AI models and third-party AI models and systems that we use for the purposes described in this Privacy Policy", eBay writes.
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The data concerned
The personal data listed under point four includes names, addresses, telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, usernames and tax identification numbers. It also includes social security number, date of birth, information from identity documents and bank details if you are a seller on eBay. And in some cases even age, gender, country of birth, nationality, country of residence, employment status, marital status, interests and preferences. According to the new privacy policy, all of this information can be passed on to the AI in order to train it.
It also states that measures will be taken "to minimize any potential impact on data protection". This is to be achieved through filtering and data masking, among other things. It is of course also possible to object to your own data being used to train the AI.
eBay also wants to work according to the principles of "responsible AI" and thus comply with ethical standards. Companies such as Google and Microsoft also operate according to similar guidelines. In general, these are a collection of principles based on values such as transparency, fairness and privacy. eBay also states precisely these three values in a document published in January 2024.
(tlz)
