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Is Flippa violating your privacy and reading your PMs?

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4 Comments
by
Clinton
, July 20th, 2010 at 10:01 AM (1394 Views)
In recent news was the fact that Flippa was hacked.

A screenshot was made public of what the admin control panel looked like. Picture here.

Note in the top right the text "You may temporarily log in as this user. BEWARE, your actions will be real"

This suggests that Flippa admins can log in to your account and read the PMs you exchange with other users, or even send PMs in your name!

This could be a good way of them catching people reaching private deals and bypassing the marketplace; such monitoring could protect Flippa's revenue from success fees.

They could also, presumably, spy on your watchlist.

But is it ethical? And do you think Flippa admins do snoop on you? What other reasons can you think of for them needing access to log into your account as you?

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Comments

  1. meathead1234's Avatar
    Unethical, but understandable. To be honest, I doubt they go through everyone's PMs unless there is a specific problem or they want to ban an account. There are too many members to be able to monitor everything. I wouldn't view it much differently to a forum owner being able to read PM logs on their sites. Perhaps they need access in case there are legal issues with certain users? Perhaps a trigger happy lawyer suing over a scam on their site? I had an email recently from Flippa support about a suspicious bid on one of my sites, and they mentioned that the "bidder" hadn't PM'ed me - so this implied they had been reading my messages. I take quite a cynical view on sites like Flippa, so would never disclose personal info (other than contact details) through PM.
  2. Clinton's Avatar
    I have no problem with viewing PM logs if logs don't disclose any private information and provide only admin required information like amount of disk space being used.

    I would certainly not (and can't) read PM boxes of users here.

    If they do access personal messages, they are likely breaking the law. UK citizens like you have this protection irrespective of where Flippa is based, and could have a valid case against them.
  3. tke71709's Avatar
    Nothing in their privacy policy or T&C about them being able to read your PMs.

    http://flippa.com/privacy
  4. flipfilter's Avatar
    This is possibly a shortsighted view but I understand their need to do this and personally have no problem with it.

    We cant have our cake and eat it - either we ask them to clean up the place and give them the resources to do it, or make everything superprivate and have to do business in a lawless land of thieves and miscreants (or Manchester as we call it )
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