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Cookies and Web Bugs

We use cookies on our site. That’s no secret and we disclose that fact in our Privacy Policy (at http://www.allauto.com.au/auction/help/community/png-priv.html) in Section 2 ("Information We Collect"). We use cookies for a variety of purposes, some of which are -- to make our site navigation quicker and more convenient for you, to track whether we already have served you an advertisement, and to analyze page flow and usage.

We serve some of the cookies ourselves through our technology and we use third parties such as SuperStats, DoubleClick, and LinkExchange to serve cookies. We have used DoubleClick for approximately two years and have a professional relationship with them. Additionally, we are also testing the cookie technology of SuperStats and others to evaluate their services.

*** We do not permit these third parties to collect personally identifiable information about you from cookies or web bugs on our web site. This means that you remain anonymous to them and therefore they cannot associate you with your activities on eBay or with any information that they may have collected about you from other web sites or real world marketing databases. ***

We have always clearly identified our use of cookies, and we will continue to be open and honest with you about their use on our site. We have seen a number of inaccurate discussions surrounding these issues on public discussion forums, and we want to clarify some of the most common issues in this letter.

DoubleClick
We have not authorized Doubleclick to collect any personally identifiable information from our site or your activities on our site and we have called DoubleClick and confirmed that fact. We also have a software management tool that allows us to check the site configuration for the DART network. We checked our software and confirmed that DoubleClick does not collect any personally identifiable information. The DoubleClick cookies that are in place currently are used to display the advertisements and check how often the image is served and what image is displayed.

Search Page
If you go to our search page and enter a search term such as “red fire truck” you will see in the source code a line that will contain “kw=red fire truck”. The search term becomes the keyword for our code to search our web site for search term items. We do associate banners with keywords, however our policy is to not serve up banner ads that are directly competitive with the search term you enter. This is a new policy based on your feedback in recent weeks.

DART Source Code
This code is the visibility="hidden" code. This is standard DART code that allows for the page to load without waiting for the banner to load first. It allows the page to load quicker and the banner ads to load after the initial page has loaded. It also calls up the image from the servers where it is stored. Without this code in the tag, the page would load with a black bar in place of the banner until the banner loaded, instead of having it blend with the page.

DART Number
The DART number in the source code of our pages ("ord=8184334" for example) is used to defeat the caching of ads and is not a User Id number. The number may vary but is used to pull information from DoubleClick on the type and size of the banner we have chosen to display on that page.

Web Bugs
Web bugs are 1 x 1 clear gif pixels that are placed in the web page code. We use web bugs for many of the same purposes we use cookies. We also use them to track the migrations of users from one page to another on our site. The information collected is in aggregate form and not personally identifiable.

Discussion Board Cookies
Our service provider for the discussion boards uses session cookies to facilitate the functionality of their service. These cookies allow their service to operate more efficiently.

*** Please let us reiterate -- We do not permit these third parties to collect personally identifiable information about you from cookies or web bugs on our web site. ***

The source code and DART text can be very long and very confusing. It takes a strong background in HTML and programming to fully understand the code. We understand that your privacy is important and that is why we have a detailed privacy policy describing how we use your information. Our privacy policy also requires us to notify you of changes to the policy, either by email or by posting on the announcement page.

We will continue to use cookies to make the use of the site easier to personalize your experience (maintaining your selling preferences, your local trading region, you’re my eBay selections, etc.) as well as to implement and deter fraud and other trust & safety violations.

But we hope that this letter helps clarify the use of cookies in relation to our advertising initiative. The success of our advertising initiative is important. The revenue generated from this initiative will help cover past investments in our technology and our customer support organization. But just as importantly, the revenue generated from this initiative will help us cover future investments in marketing and advertising campaigns.