Privacy

31650 readers

383 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

Chat rooms

[Matrix/Element]Dead
Discord

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

How do online marketplaces like Amazon and Ebay track electronics sales? (lemmy.world)

submitted 6 months ago by MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.world to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

12 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Say I purchase a laptop from Amazon/Walmart/any big box store. I assume they note down the unique identifier for the device and link it to the purchase, which has my credit card information.

How would Ebay do this? I'm curious about the extent of information that the marketplace giants have of consumers purchasing electronics from them. Cheap Chinese gizmos might not have unique identifiers but a Dell Laptop certainly has a few.

I'm sure some here can imagine the technical reason for the question. Have a good day ahead!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Alexstarfire@lemmy.world 3 points 6 months ago

I'd be surprised but perhaps my information is just out of date. They do need to make sure you return the correct model but typically that's done by visually verifying what you return matches what was sold. This can be problematic which is why you sometimes here about people having returned bricks instead of the proper item at Walmart.

Though, a PS5 may have been a bad example because you do tend to reach certain price points were things differ. Like CPUs typically are kept track of individually, though GPUs often aren't.