eBay is adding a section to its privacy policy next month to bring customers up to speed on how it uses Artificial Intelligence (AI). The new User Privacy Notice goes into effect on April 8, 2024, and includes some other changes as well as some minor edits.
Section 11 of the eBay User Privacy Notice deals with data protection, specifically, “important additional information about the protection of personal data in connection with the use of our Services, including whether you are required to provide personal data.” eBay added the following sub-section:
Use of Artificial Intelligence or AI-Powered Tools
We may use artificial intelligence or AI-powered tools and products to improve our Services, to offer you new or enhanced features, a customized and personalized experience, to provide you with enhanced customer service, and to support fraud detection.
The new notice takes effect next month, but eBay CEO Jamie Iannone recently said eBay is already using AI to handle some customer service queries, as we reported on Tuesday on the EcommerceBytes Blog. Iannone said eBay has replaced certain customer service agents with AI, which “reads” emails and “writes” initial responses.
“In our customer support centers,” Iannone disclosed to Wall Street analysts on February 27th, “we’ve been using AI to really change the level of engagement we have with customers and the productivity.”
As we noted in Tuesday’s blog post, Iannone did not say whether eBay notifies customers when it uses AI to respond – nor does the privacy notice address that issue.
eBay also made changes to Section 5, “Purposes and legal basis for data processing and categories of recipients.” Section 5.1 starts off, “We process your personal data in order to fulfill our contract with you and to provide you with our Services,” and eBay added the following verbiage: “as well as for the execution of the transaction between seller and buyer.”
Section 5.4 starts off with, “Provision of functions for users that make the processing of transactions easier or more convenient (e.g. administration of several delivery addresses,” and added the following verbiage: “updating stored payment information from time to time based on information provided by your bank or other payments services providers) or provide users with more information about their transactions (e.g., calculating CO₂ emissions from eBay purchases).”
eBay changed the name of section 6 from “International data transfers” to “Cross-border data transfers,” and in other areas, it changed the term “user ID” to “username” for consistency.
eBay sent an email to customers in early March calling out the following “Notable changes” (none of which specifically mentioned AI):
- Additional information about the personal data we collect, the purposes for which we use that data, and how we share and process personal data within the eBay Inc. corporate family and with other businesses and service providers.
- Additional information about the personal data we process to comply with new consumer, anti-fraud and tax regulations.
- Updates to the regional privacy disclosures to comply with new information requirements.
eBay buyers and sellers should read the new policy completely before it goes into effect next month.
