Sell That Chandelier On eBay? The IRS Will Want To Know

May 7, 2007

In what is sure to be a development troubling to privacy advocates, an item in President Bush's 2008 iscal year budget would mandate Internet e-commerce sites to track personal data on their customers and share it with the Internal Revenue Service.

The measure would, for example, require sites such as eBay and Amazon to track and report transactions by Social Security number. These transactional reportings would presumably be used to match up with the declared income of individuals.

To be effective on or after January 1, 2008, the proposals would only track individuals or businesses who generated $5,000 in income via at least 100 separate transactions. Yet because the broker would be liable for any unreported income, there's a fear on the part of the Center for Democracy and Technology that a far wider reporting net would be set out.

"Such data retention proposals would force the creation of massive, privately maintained databases of personally identifiable data that government investigators could tap at their leisure," the CDT warns.