It looks like eBay CEO Meg Whitman is going to invade the small town of Bettendorf, IA to stump for presidential candidate Mitt Romney. This is an interesting wrinkle, with eBay screwing all of its buyers and sellers over constantly, its not really a surprise that they’d like to see a pro-big business candidate like Romney get elected. Such presidents are often very helpful in getting legislation through that legalizes such screwings or helps to make it difficult for consumers to hold companies responsible for them.

The strange auction, which had a current bid of Euro 10 Million (about $13 Million USD) before being ended, was listed by one disgruntled Belgian in protest of his country’s political crisis, which reached a 100-day landmark on Tuesday with no end in sight to the squabbling between Flemish and Walloon politicians.

As everyone has undoubtedly noticed (including the media), eBay has revamped its site and continue to focus on ways to make the site easier to use for buyers. According to eBay, this is all that is needed is a few tweaks and the site will hum with the magic and glory it once did. Of course, I’d disagree. Buyers are seller’s customers and sellers are eBay’s customers. eBay needs to start taking care of its sellers, instead of pulling their usual crap.

According to this C|Net News piece, PayPal co-founder and Facebook-backer Peter Thiel is a major investor in two websites designed to spy on social network users.

The first website is called RapLeaf, and there your personals are public. Using an e-mail address, you can find out the user’s name, age and any social network affiliations. You can also signup to “manage your privacy”, which is quite humorous, considering that to sign up you have to give up personal information.

The second website is known as Upscoop, whose moto is “Get the scoop on all your friends.” and allows you to discover what social networks people in your contact list belong to. To use this website, you’ll have to cough up your username and password for Gmail, AOL, Hotmail or Yahoo.

I am guess I shouldn’t be surprised, PayPal can be credited with having re-invented  the idea of privacy violation and this just goes to show what the people behind PayPal are thinking about.

I originally learned of this from a post on Pogo Was Right.

eBay is one of the worst companies with regard to sending you twenty e-mails when just one would do. Every little thing with eBay seems to require an e-mail, some of them they wont let you turn off in your communication preferences. For someone who signed into My eBay on a daily basis, an e-mail informing me that an item was sold is unneeded.

But they specifically disallow you from turning these off, for what reason I have no clue. I was reminded of this portion of my experience when I ran across the eBay Hell website, which chronicles one user’s attempt to get eBay to stop sending him “product surveys” to measure his satisfaction with the company.