eBay's New User Agreement Includes Permission to Make Outbound Robocalls
February 28, 2013
By Tracey E. Schelmetic, TMCnet Contributor
If you sign up for a new eBay (News - Alert) account in the near future, you may want to prepare yourself. You may be about to receive outbound robocalls from the online auction giant. Starting on March 26, eBay says it will be giving itself permission to make outbound robocalls and text messages for marketing and promotional reasons. New users will be granting the company permission to do so when they create new accounts.
The company’s new user agreement will read as follows:
“You agree to receive calls, including autodialed and/or pre-recorded message calls, from eBay at any of the telephone numbers (including mobile telephone numbers) that we have collected for you as authorized and described in our Privacy Policy, including telephone numbers you have provided us, or that we have obtained from third parties or collected by our own efforts. If the telephone number that we have collected is a mobile telephone number, you consent to receive SMS or other text messages at that number or on that mobile device.”
The March 26 user agreement will supersede all previous eBay user agreements. It’s unclear whether existing accounts will be grandfathered on old agreements, which do not explicitly include the outbound robodialing provision.
Robocalls, or automated outbound telephone calls made to customers by an automated system, are governed by a strict set of rules. Customers must give permission (by agreement to a user agreement, for example) before a company can make these types of calls.
The good news, according to Jared Newman, Time’s technology blogger, is that you can opt out of the robocalls, if you choose to do so, by following these steps.
1. Sign into your eBay account and click the “My eBay” link near the top-right part of the screen.
2. On the summary page, hover your cursor over the “Account” tab, which appears right below the bold text reading “My eBay: Summary.”
3. From here, click “Communication Preferences.”
4. Scroll down to the bottom of the page, and click “Show” under the section for “Promotions and Surveys.”
5. Uncheck the “Phone (News - Alert) updates and promotions” option. Or just uncheck everything.
According to Newman, however, when he followed these same steps, his existing account indicated that the box for receiving outbound promotions and surveys was checked, so it’s possible that eBay is applying this new rule retroactively to all accounts.
Edited by Amanda Ciccatelli