Man Tries to Auction Off His Personal Details on eBay, Gets Shut Down

With social media making money by basically selling the personal information of users to advertisers to get ad revenue, it seems at least one man has had enough of giving away his goods for free. As such, he decided to put up his personal information for auction on eBay, where he asked for money in exchange for something he already puts out on a daily basis. Unfortunately for him, his plans were shut down.

The man is Oli Frost, 26, a resident of London, England. Frost revealed to Motherboard that he made the decision after realizing that someone else was making money off of something he has the rights to. He decided that if anyone was going to earn a profit from his personal information, it was going to be him.

“There were loads of emails from companies over the last week about GDPR, saying how valuable and important my data was to them,” Frost said via email. “I realized that I’d been selling my data for free for ages, and decided it was time to cash in.”

Frost did so by creating an auction at eBay, where he offered his personal information at a starting price of $99 cents. He told bidders that they can do with the details what they will. They could even sell it to Facebook if they wanted to. At one point, the bidding had over 40 participants and the amount reached £300, or nearly $400.

Unfortunately, as Gizmodo reports, the auction was promptly shut down by eBay itself. Frost received a message from the site, which read: “Some of your listings haven’t followed our Mailing List and Personal Information policy.”

“Your listing is selling an account for Facebook, which is not permitted as most social networking companies have limitations in their terms of service that restrict the artificial boosting of another member’s following or popularity, or the sale of accounts with established followings. Given that, eBay as a company has decided not to allow listings that would facilitate or promote this type of activity. While we appreciate that you have chosen to utilize our site, we must ask that you please not relist this type of service,” it continued.