Why can some bidders hide their IDs?

[waxu_93]

不公开的物品刊登 - 不公开出价者的身份

Unlisted listings - The identity of the bidder is not disclosed

An ID with a long string of numbers like this， and followed by the records of her buying and selling a lot of things in eBay. 99.99% of them are Chinese buying and selling intermediaries.

[melda58]

All bidders names are hidden like that in the USA as far as I know.  This practice started years ago to protect buyers ' privacy.   You can see your own name if bidding though. 

Rita

[waxu_93]

Some are hidden, some are public.For example, Figure 2 is public.

I mainly want to see if other Chinese people are also buying it.

Because most Chinese people’s IDs are purely numerical。

[eburtonlab]

If you see a username in the bid history displayed as any character, three asterisks and another character, it is because eBay has hidden the actual username. If you sign out of your account and view the same bid history page, your bids should appear the same way.

[downunder-61]

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@melda58 wrote:

All bidders names are hidden like that in the USA as far as I know.  This practice started years ago to protect buyers ' privacy.   You can see your own name if bidding though. 

Rita

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In every country AFAIK - (buyers) - only the account holder can see their own id, only the seller (lister of the auction) can see all id's. Pretty sure this was changed a long time ago to stop members from contacting a buyer if they won an auction that the member wanted and missed out on.