Privacy Breach by Trade Me!

Bonnie, Trademe have changed things without any notification. There is now a profile edit button on your Community page so you can have an Alias just for here. Click your name in any post or comment to go to your Community page, then you'll see the Edit button. Rather remiss of Trademe to make this change in the way they have, but there you go.

Thanks Bonnie and Gary. Yes, I think Trade Me either need to change it back to grabbing first name only, or at the least create a sticky "featured post" to tell people how to add a different Alias if they want.

I didn't notice earlier as only made one comment yesterday and that was in the morning, but it's still not been vetted so is still Pending after 21 hours and shows my original name. It wasn't till I clicked my name on here that I saw on my profile page it was displaying my surname too, so I edited my profile and my contact details page too. Another member had asked me about this surname thing last night via messenger, but I was being fooled as I was only looking at my pending post which was unchanged. Trademe certainly need to revert it back and remove everyone's surnames before they get inundated with requests from angry members.

Thanks Gary,

Yes, like others I was horrified last night when I came to boards for a catch up read, and saw that,

went and changed my surname on my membership address, as a temporary measure,

I'm picking they have made some changes sitewide, so will see what else pops up. One they have made that is going to impact the number of community watch reports, is that today when you make a CW report, the page refreshes after you have already copy/pasted in the details of the report, wiping them from the details box, meaning you have to click in to the details box again and start over, if you notice in time and if you still have what you pasted in there initially. Looks like a day off to do something else.

Hi Gary, thank you for letting me know, and for your comments. I haven't fixed Trade Me's privacy-breach of my surname yet, as I think it is important to keep it up there, for a while, as an example, so that other members are alerted to this security-breach problem, what it looks like, and your solution about how to fix the problem. Trade Me committed the privacy-breach, so they should fix it! 

No worries. Pretty easy to see them, especially if you look at the main Community posts page with lots of surnames right there. https://help.trademe.co.nz/hc/en-us/community/topics

I can't figure out the logic behind why it displays some surnames and not others, but maybe it's tied in to the recent change where a member can now change their own Trademe membername.

Gary-NZStocked,

I suspect they haven't switched all Members over yet - I noted we all didn't change at the same time & if you look at your User Profile, when select Comments the Edit Tab doesn't appear yet though does under all the other options - Activity view - Badges - Posts - so piecemeal though definitely a Breach of Privacy! - Cheers.

Poor form Trade Me, poor form.

I can't even see an obvious way to get to the edit your profile details unless you have made a post and so can find that post and click your own name in the post.

I had to go digging through my email notifications to find a thread I had participated in to find my post to click my own profile to find the field to edit.

This silence from Trademe is not good :( They should have been able to make an apology and statement about this change by now and let us know when they are going to do a blanket change of everyone's names back so surnames are no longer shown as this is obviously a concern to many. I don't understand why they did not tell us in advance they were going to do this?

Yes, perhaps it needs a sharper legal mind than me. But this might be bad enough to be a breach of the Privacy Act 2020.

If so, that would be a notifiable privacy breach. Meaning Trade Me need to notify individuals that their personal information has been made public. Probably depends on whether a surname is considered personal information.

Either way Trade Me do need to get onto this pretty swiftly. If nothing else they've breached their own T&Cs. You could say that all 4 of their principles have been stretched here. I'm sure it would fit most people's definitions of being creepy!

Hi Callum and Gary, yes, I totally agree with you. I did a Contact Us, to report the breach to Trade Me, and asked, at that time, for a Trade Me staff-member to email me, re the problem, but - even though the robot said that someone would get back to me - there has still been no reply, at all, from any Trade Me member, about the breach, but just absolute silence about the matter.

There is still one member's name that hasn't been fixed on Community Post, so I have alerted the person about that, and suggested that they do a Contact  Us to Trade Me. I have also told Trade Me that there is an ongoing privacy breach, because it hasn't been totally fixed for everyone.

Once they do tell us what's going on, maybe they can also provide more info and a help page on the new Community Edit profile function and where for example the information we put in the description box that has a tagline "Tell the rest of the community a bit about yourself." is shown? I've had a good look around and can't see anywhere this shows.

Bonnie

      I too contacted them on Thursday night after I saw mine, thinking I was the only one, as horrified, I did not go looking elsewhere for others, just popped into a couple of posts and out again,

After messaging above member to raise issue with them, although had not see his, I contacted Trade Me, even using via a trust and safety E-Mail I received on Thursday from a dispute, and have heard nothing back, no apologies, nothing, and they quietly shut down the community boards yesterday, with no announcements after?, they cannot just brush this breach under the carpet,

As yesterday morning, I saw a few with full names?, and feel sorry for those ones, although I use my Trading name here, those that have traded with me know my first name, after this they will know my full name, I am one that does not send courier parcels out with my full name on parcel senders address, it gets blacked out, as does my street number, if couriers have an issue they have details online from booking, as I had E-Mail from Courier a couple of years ago as had a parcel not delivered, as it was damaged,

Kia ora, 

Thanks for getting in touch.  As you’ve noted, there was a glitch on Trade Me Community where a small number of members had their first and second names published, instead of their first names or alias as usual.

We’re really sorry this happened. We’ve taken this seriously and taken steps to make sure it won’t happen again.

Michelle - Community Team