Here's one for those of you that use eBay. The Register gives us the comments of Ebay executive Joseph Sullivan.

"We don't make you show a subpoena, except in exceptional cases," Sullivan told a closed-door session at the CyberCrime 2003 conference last week.

"When someone uses our site and clicks on the `I Agree' button, it is as if he agrees to let us submit all of his data to the legal authorities. Which means that if you are a law-enforcement officer, all you have to do is send us a fax with a request for information, and ask about the person behind the seller's identity number, and we will provide you with his name, address, sales history and other details - all without having to produce a court order. We want law enforcement people to spend time on our site."

They also note that eBay boasts about logging every piece of user information back as far as 1995.