e.bay gave me someone's private phone number after complaint - broken DPA?

[weldingjoe]

i have been a member of e.bay for over 6 years, and in that time bought and sold countless items.

ive never had a problem until recently !,

 

a couple of weeks back a bloke contacted me through e.bay about an item i had listed through them { as ive allways done},

the amount of money in question was £600.00 { a lot of dosh},

he wanted to know all about it{rightly so},

i gave him as much information as i could using the e.bay e.mail.

 

unbeknown to me he tried to send his private contact phone number to me through e.bay { quite rightly it was blocked},

i knew he wanted to talk to me because of what he put,

 

i took a picture of my phone number and tried to send it through e.bay{ again quite rightly blocked},

he asked if i could hold on to the item for a couple of weeks because he was working away,

i replied { through e.bay} could he put down a deposit on the item as i told him ive had a lot of timewasters, and i would remove the listing " as an act of good faith".

 

as it happend on the same day i received an e.mail from e.bay " threatening me with sanctions" because as they put it " we were both trying to sell/buy out side of their policies and we were breaking " DATA PROTECTION" by trying to give each others phone number out { again no argument with this}, plus i didnt know at this point they had completley blocked him from contacting me in any way.

 

i was very angry that i,d been accused of wrongdoing,

i wrote a complaint e.mail to them.

 

i received an e.mail from the c.e.o,s assistant telling and warning me of the consequences,

but in that same e.mail he had sent the prospective buyers contact telephone number, i couldent belive it !,

for the first time i had seen the very number of the prospective buyer { the very thing they had blocked and warned us about}

 

i telephoned the number and the prospective buyer asked " how did you get this number",

i told him,

he was fuming, ,

 

i wrote another e.mail back to the same person pointing all this out, and complained,

his reply was " arrogant, self opinionated" to say the least

" to which he said we havent broken any law" even though i pointed out " all correspondence has been done through e.bay".

 

ive now complained to the relevant body about this and was told after i explained that they "HAD"  broken data protection. 

 

ive now requested all relevant documents from e.bay relating to this under the " freedom of imformation act".

heres one member who wont use them again......joe

[dx100uk]

topic title updated

moved to online forums

 

dx

[Ethel Street]

It's a Data Protection Act Subject Access Request [SAR] you need to make, not Freedom of Information Act request. Freedom of Information Act only applies to public bodies so not to eBay. Data Protection SAR applies to all organisation in UK/EU. There's a SAR template you can use on here, just click the link to SAR in this post and it will take you to it.

Edited April 2, 2019 by Ethel Street

[ericsbrother]

have you read the ebay terms regarding dispute resolution? You have agreed to this data sharing so not a breach so the only question wouild be is this a dispute about an item purchased on ebay? if there was no purchase then they have royally screwed up.

Now as it was someone else's data passed to you then it is for the data subject to raise merry hell so was your number given to them as well is the salient point for you.

[king12345]

Now that you have his number you can close the transaction for cash outside ebay and make more money.

Let the guy fight his battle if he wants to.