I have to pass along these final two legal stories today. First Ebay is being sued by a PA. user that says Ebay has tricked many users to increase their own bids in auctions that they would have won at lower prices. As an example, when you bid on an item and your bid reaches it’s limit, you are sent an email that says your bid is at your maximum. With the bid increment mechanism, your current bid will be raised to the next increment as soon as you raise your maximum. This happened to me on several auctions and I thought it was a cash grabbing gimmick from Ebay. It’s good to see someone trying to stop them for doing it.
Next is an update from the Choicepoint ID theft scandal. A California woman has filed the first lawsuit against ChoicePoint for fraud and negligence in the wake of the company’s recent disclosure that it sold personal information about more than 140,000 people to identity thieves. From Wired:
Eileen Goldberg filed the suit Friday in Los Angeles Superior Court after receiving one of about 34,000 letters that ChoicePoint sent to California residents informing them that the company had mistakenly sold personal data about them to identity thieves.
According to the filing, Goldberg seeks to hold ChoicePoint responsible for negligence in protecting the private data of consumers from scam artists who purchased it from the company. The scam continued for a year before ChoicePoint discovered what the thieves were up to.