eBay is rolling out its new "Safeguarding Member IDs" project to the UK site after launching it on the U.S. Motors site earlier this month. The new feature reduces the transparency of bidding activity for shoppers in an effort to fight scammers who employ spoof phishing techniques, and eBay may roll out the change to eBay.com in early 2007.

eBay is implementing the new system on eBay.co.uk listings with a high bid of £100 or greater. The bid information for listings where the bid is lower than £100 will continue to display as it always had.

For listings with a high bid of £100 or more, eBay will replace member User IDs with aliases (such as Bidder 1, Bidder 2 and Bidder 3) on the bid history page in the order of their bids placed. For each bidder involved in a listing, we’ll display the number of bids in unique categories that they’ve placed, a range that their feedback score falls within (i.e. 10-49, for instance), their percentage of positive feedback, their length of time as an eBay member, and the number of bids they’ve placed on the item. At the end of a listing, the winning bidder’s User ID will be displayed on the item page. Please note: Sellers will still be able to access bidder information on their listings through the Bid History page and the My eBay selling table.

eBay first announced the new project in the U.S. on November 3, 2006

http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y06/m11/i03/s01

http://www2.ebay.com/aw/uk/200611211103382.html