Privacy

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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.

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

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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!

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 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I'd be surprised but perhaps my information is just out of date.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.