Signing in when using a VPN

[monouk2008]

Just in case an ebay support person sees this, I have raised this on the phone twice in the past.

I use a VPN for basic privacy reasons, it is always on. Whenever I sign in to ebay it makes me go through the sign-in, 2FA, and CAPTCHA process three times, sometimes more. This isnt a problem with the VPN because it works for every other site I visit.

Making my life hard isn't going to wear me down, in fact, it only serves to remind me that I need to do more to keep my online activity private.

Yours sincerely,

An Onion

[comics-scifi-collectibles]

@monouk2008  eBay's security system doesn't like VPN's.   Sorry to say they are not going to change the programming.   You can turn off your VPN when using eBay and use 2 factor verification.  

https://accounts.ebay.co.uk/acctsec/security-center

Unfortunately "bad actors" use VPN's to try and trick eBay's system for where they are actually located.   Not allowing VPN , or making it difficult, helps stop hackers.  

[eburtonlab]

Not all VPNs are equal.

You may have better results using a VPN with a static IP-address.

[monouk2008]

@comics-scifi-collectibles  Firstly, thank you for the reply.

I already use 2FA as per my original message, but 2FA is for security not privacy. I don't expect eBay to change anything, a large chunk of their profits come from impulse buyers, much like Amazon. So disallowing marketing data to be collected is not very high on their priority list.

I won't be disabling my VPN, I will just use eBay less, this was more of a rant at the sorry state of affairs. On  a side-note, hackers don't really use VPNs because if you have the IP address of the VPN server (which everybody does) then you can trace the requests straight back to the origin. Instead they are used to provide a secure tunnel in or out of an area. In my case, all traffic is encrypted before leaving my devices meaning the ISP cannot harvest data, and using a public VPN means my traffic is mingled with 1000's of other users, thus making it harder to tell me apart from the crowd - hence privacy through hiding in plain sight.

[monouk2008]

Hi @eburtonlab

The VPN I use is consistently ranked at the top of the list for consumer privacy. Most VPN hosts assign static IPs to their public VPN servers, this is how sites like eBay can identify the traffic as coming from a VPN.

Hosting a private static IP for the VPN would completely negate the privacy features that are obtained through using a public IP, making all of my traffic comes a from a single IP address would make me easy to fingerprint.