In a message dated 1/16/2007 4:13:48 P.M. Pacific Standard Time, jeffryy at prevea.com writes: Has anyone bid, or won anything with these bidder identification protected auctions? The seller of the Zonophone-A is doing that with that particular auction. ==================== eBay has always had an option for keeping bidders private, but this is not the case here. Recently eBay instituted a new policy whereby anything that tops $200 becomes "protected." It's not the seller's choice. Instead of showing bidder IDs it shows "Bidder 1, " "Bidder 2" etc. This is an attempt to combat rampant fraud since so many scammers are sending fake "second chance" notices to underbidders. By hiding bidders on higher-priced items they hope to cut down on these scams. It will also prevent people from offering similar items to underbidders by private message. On the bid history page you can view some statistics on the bidders. Perhaps the most telling is the one that shows what percent of the bidder's total bid activity is with the particular seller. In the Zonophone auction, for example, the current high bidder has 42% of activity with the seller. That's certainly very high. It also shows the categories the bidder has been active in, so it's very easy to see if a person who spends most of his time buying Christmas ornaments is suddenly a player on high-end collector phonographs. The new system is far from ideal, and I confess I liked to see what other people were bidding on. But by the same token, I never liked airing my own bid history publicly so I guess I'm a hypocrite at heart! Overall I think this new system will have more pros than cons. (And it will hopefully stifle some of the con artists, pun intended....) Best regards, Rene Rondeau