[silas]

Interesting bit from the linked comments via "egoodman85":

Hey, just want to clarify something as an Etsy employee. It's not your purchases that are public - it's your feedback on those purchases. I know it's a small distinction, but it's not like we have some sort of desire to publicize our members' purchases. Feedback is public by default just like it is on eBay - to increase accountability and transparency. It's also worth noting that feedback has been public since the site's launch (in fact, the option to make it private was only added recently). The new People Search feature does not change this at all.

[bigiain]

FWIW, it's not just "your" feedback, it's also any feedback left by sellers on purchases you've made, which identify your purchase whether you left any feedback or not.

(search etsy for my username for an example)

I see this as a _major_ privacy screwup by Etsy. I don't mind people being able to see the earrings I bought my girlfriend a few years back, but I can _easily_ see people having purchases exposed that they really didn't ever expect to be made public. (and I'll guess there's a whole category of items that stop being bought on Etsy, and a category of purchases that won't be made there any more (who's gonna buy their mistress jewelery on Etsy any more?))

[gfodor]

For the record, this is how it's always been on Etsy. However, we pushed a change earlier tonight that removes seller feedback from public view. This seemed like the right thing to do and is appropriate now that we are using the newest PayPal API to ensure payment before an item is sold on the site -- this removed a lot of the reasons for the public visibility of the specifics of seller feedback. Note that your feedback score as a whole is still visible, so we haven't removed seller feedback altogether.

[code_duck]

The difference is that now, there are ways to identify people by their email addresses (via the address book upload), and Etsy asks for and displays people's real names. Neither of these were the case before a couple of months ago.

They let you enter your full name easily, but don't let you change it very easily. You have to ask customer service.

Privacy changes on Etsy aren't communicated very well, in my experience. They very rarely communicate changes to all members via email - hence, like the article says, if something changes and you don't visit the site frequently, you will never know. Some features start as opt-in, turn to opt-out, then change to not-opt-outable, and so on.

[kmfrk]

So someone wrote feedback for the aforementioned dildo?

How's that for satisfied customers.

What confuses me is that the privacy setting says:

    PURCHASES
    Who can see your purchases?

*

EDIT: I'll try to think out loud here and update as I wrap my head around this.

One of the examples states that he found a woman's results by her favourites. Those have always been an (opt-in) part of the privacy settings as I know.

The question is a) how he tied her favourites to her person on Google, and b) how the former example tied the purchase (or favourite, or buyer feedback) to the person. In (b), I haven't found anything that explicitly says that the woman was identified - just that some woman's dildo-related purchase was somehow visible.

Did they know the person by their user name and identify the person, or were the full names somehow visible, which created the - justified - outrage?

I hope this is a misunderstanding, but there are still some unanswered questions. Etsy deserves the benefit of the doubt, of course.

*

UPDATE: Using this link:

    http://www.etsy.com/people/<user_name>/feedback?type=for_others

replacing <user_name> with your own (wait for it) user name, your feedback history will show up.

I have not found any way to disable this.

This is, ipso facto, not contingent on the new privacy settings. It's a problem, but nothing points to it being a new one. I can't form a causal relationship like Ars Technica does based on this.

*

Hopefully last update:

This all seems to be supported by Etsy's CEO: http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2011/03/etsy-users-irked-aft....

I don't know how display of purchases (not buyer feedback) was handled before, but I'll leave that head-ache for someone else to figure out.

Let's hope that Ars Technica own up to this correction and rectifies it.

*

Addendum:

Seller feedback is also public like Buyer feedback. Caveat emptor indeed.

cf. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2325006

[code_duck]

Favorites, feedback, etc being public is not opt-in on Etsy. They're public by default.