I was banned from eBay this week.

Don't ask me why, because I don't know.  And eBay won't tell me.

I believe that my account was locked because my daughter bought a Halloween costume they somehow considered suspect.  When I tried to contact customer support, their customer service rep asked for a phone number, but the number they apparently have on record was one I've never used (I've had the same phone number since the mid-1990s).  The customer service rep suggested I open a new account, which I did, but this apparently triggered a lifetime ban.

What is galling about the experience is that eBay refuses to tell me why.  They somehow believe that telling me would allow scammers to learn how to circumvent their "system" and make the community "unsafe."

There are many problems with this argument, of course.  It's a classic example of security by obscurity — if I don't tell you how the encryption algorithm works, you can't circumvent it.  Asking me for publicly available information to "verify my identity" is pure security theater (just like how asking for the last four digits of my Social Security number can violate my privacy).

Whatever their justification for using this particular process, scams still proliferate on eBay.  I was trying to sell some old Disney "fine art" limited edition prints I'd purchased years ago.  While trying to estimate the value of these prints, I searched for similar items on eBay — and discovered thousands of unlicensed, even pornographic, prints using Disney characters.  These are sold for a few dollars as electronic downloads or printed and shipped, with the actual cost of the item built into the shipping.

These are scams, and eBay does nothing to control them, probably because they most often originate out of China.  One rule of thumb in Silicon Valley seems to be that you are not allowed to do anything that might result in action by the Chinese government.  Ever.

Whatever the merits (or lack of merits) of their "system," however, eBay's attitude and double standards expose one of the ugliest secrets of these large information companies.  Any time there is an apparent double-standard, there is some single underlying standard the standard-maker doesn't want to discuss.

The single standard is this: if the service is free, you are the product.

When a company like eBay says, "You are threatening our community," you should emphasize the word our.  They own the community and use their ownership of the "community" to increase their power and profit.  If you, as a user, are not increasing their power or profit, then you are not worth "doing business with," and you will be banned.  Permanently.

It's not a "community" in the traditional sense, but more of a closed sports bar where the owner controls what's on the television screens, who may talk to whom, and what may be said.

Returning to "you are the product" — if a company charges less for a service than it costs to deliver it, they must make money in some other way. In the world of social media, this means selling access to the individual user.

But what does it mean to sell access to individual users?

The most benign take on this is that these companies sell your attention.  The more engaged you are in the eBay "community," the more likely you are to buy or sell, and hence the more valuable you are as a "member of the community."  The more engaged you are on Facebook, the more likely you react to advertising on the platform and hence the more likely to make money for Facebook.

This benign take, however, is naïve because it takes influence through advertising to be fairly harmless to the human person.  We should seriously question this assertion, particularly in the case of intensely targeted advertising based on personal profiles built up through surveillance.

The more malevolent take is making more money is just the tip of the iceberg.  Once a specific penetration rate has been achieved through advertising, social media services necessarily move toward controlling their users by managing the information they see — again, using the deeply researched profiles of each user developed through surveillance — to support the worldview of the services' owners and operators.

These two goals — benign and malevolent — are not easy to separate; increasing control results in increasing profits, and increasing profits results in increasing control.

Ultimately, when we say, "You are the product," we mean something like this: "the ability to consume your attention, predict and change your decisions, and change what you believe."  We don't often think about it in these terms, but making people the product is or should be against every instinct we have as humans and against the founding ideals of Western thought.

Returning to eBay, I don't engage with their service enough to be profitable.  They've attempted, of course, to pull me into their ecosystem, just like all other social media networks, but I've resisted.  They'd prefer not to have users who consume value without giving them value back, so I'm not much of a loss to their "community" (unlike those sellers of knockoff copyrighted works in China).

Further, I'm a little suspicious because I won't be "pulled in."  I'm a bit of an outsider, so anything I do that might look a little "off," like my daughter buying a Halloween costume from South Korea, is going to ring alarm bells in their algorithm.

They don't need to bother telling me any of this because they aren't required to be transparent.  Social media have skirted the laws and social contracts that apply to other businesses by being large enough not to care about any individual customer.  They are protected in their censorship (promoting their worldview) through Section 230 and claiming they are a "person" with First Amendment rights.  They are protected in their lack of censorship through the claim in Section 230 that they are a common carrier.

Social media companies are a "special case" in the law.  They are allowed to be large enough to kill off all competition, they are allowed to push a single viewpoint, and they are allowed to treat users as malleable information sources and influence targets.

Ultimately, the question comes down to this: what can we do about it?  There aren't many legal remedies that have a chance of passing muster.  There is no way to take other legal action against the companies — they are essentially off-limits as targets of lawsuits because of their protections under Section 230.

We can all lessen their power by just not giving them so much of our attention in the first place.  (I outline some specific strategies in my latest book, Unfriending Dystopia.)

In the meantime, I'm going to find another place to sell this limited-edition Disney art.  Or, if not, maybe I'll just drop it in the trash can, a symbol of my sacrifice against yet another company — essentially another social media company — that has grown too big for the good of our society.