Massachusetts couple suing eBay after employees harassed and stalked them

But this case is just one step above all that. Who knows what these employees and executives did to others before, I hardly believe this was an isolated case at eBay.

I'm honestly surprised that any company would still do this sort of thing to critics after how that turned out back in the 60s. When the harassment of Nader was discovered, it put extra momentum behind the push for car safety legislation that cost the car companies lots of money and saved countless lives. Nader was then able to get lots of additional consumer safety laws passed in the 70s. Maybe they just think themselves so powerful after decades of successfully buying politicians that they think they can now get away with this kind of thing.

Me too. Sometimes I see these ideas in science fiction. I remember one black mirror episode where a tech company knows more about a suspect than the police. It's really unnerving watching them casually reveal all sorts of information, even the authorities seemed surprised.

Even worse is thinking about the resources governments have and the numberless ways they can abuse these powers.

Thankfully no black vans or ominous packages in the mail (yet).

This was my first thought when I read about the eBay accusations last year. That said, I've worked for a broad spectrum of Bay Area companies and I think pretty much everything environmental and atmospheric in DEVS was accurate. It was a better take on tech companies and their personalities than, say, "Silicon Valley," and watching it gave me a lot of uncomfortable deja vu. Highly recommended if you are in tech, ever watch TV, and haven't seen it.

Ebay is a ~$46 billion company. Yes, that pales in comparison to Google or FB. However, when it comes to going against a couple, any of those three have in essence infinite resources.

In the middle of the last decade, I moved from a town to which I had just moved, in order to get away from a stalker. I wound up moving into a celebrity's house: a multi-room unit. I listed a room for rent on craigslist, and was contacted by someone closely connected to this celebrity. That evening, I used FB DM to contact an old far away associate about an unrelated matter. The next day at a local coffee shop, a couple sat next to me and started loudly discussing both this potential rental share from the connected party, as well as the content of that private DM.

This was extremely unsettling. If you've never experienced this multiple times, it's difficult to convey how traumatizing this is. I started to question my own sanity/vanity/mental health. "Maybe I'm being self important. Maybe I have an undiagnosed mental illness." This caused me significant life damage, because it was not the first nor second time (nor the last time) that such an unattributed event occurred.

I still don't know if this was due to a corrupt FB insider feeding celebrity friends, hacking, shoulder surfing, or what. FB insider is the most logical guess. I sought help from the local tech community. Shortly thereafter, my landlord and his associate wound up threatening me -- seemingly out of context, but in a pre-meditated fashion -- with murder. Then, I was threatened by a friend of this celebrity when he promised to ruin my career if I "talk(ed) about what happened". This was highly traumatizing; I was alone, scared, and silenced. I eventually talked about it on FB. Thereafter, I was retaliated against with threats of violence and defamation from a local gang member. Based on these escalations, it seems exceedingly unlikely that the initial stalking/harassment was due to my imagination running wild.

In a seemingly unrelated matter in the same timeframe, I was stalked and targeted by two men, related to my failing startup. This occurred at a large, well-connected public establishment, also using supposedly private data (ostensibly gleaned from email this time, related to contractual matter for new client in the five figure range).

There were other incidents of harassment that occurred thereafter, particularly during the last administration. I live in an area with heavily polarized political leanings and entrenched long term racial/cultural tensions.

I did contact the police, who were unresponsive. After extensive complaining, I eventually did catch the attention of the FBI, who did offer to help, but it's been a long time and the damage is long since done, with little hope to prove anything. Testimony alone is insufficient to prove a pattern of malicious behavior by others. I've also had traumatizing experiences dealing with attorneys and courtrooms and don't wish to pursue civil action anyway.

These incidents occurred in a small, tightly knit community to which I was a total outsider transplant.

And the Egg Board is run by the government! -- "The emails all came to light because the American Egg Board is technically part of the government. It's funded by the egg industry, but it's run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture."

That goes double if the corporate culture tends to be very personality-cult-y, where executives have even more intense power than simply their position in the management chain.

What gets me is that, once again, the top of the chain managed to slide with few consequences. The low-level goons who carried out the attack of this couple got punished, while the exec(s) who ordered it either skated completely, or bailed out with a golden parachute. Truly a consequence-free environment.

I'm not going to pretend we didn't roll our eyes from time-to-time when a new article came out that seemed exaggerated, but the thought of retaliation never crossed anyone's mind.

I'm pretty sure we would've been summarily fired if we had even made contact with Ina, let alone any of the psycho shit outlined here.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotel_Ritz_(Lisbon)

>The investigation also found that former CEO Wenig had made “inappropriate communications” but did not have advance knowledge of the harassment and stalking. Wenig, who was not charged, was allowed to resign in September 2019 with a compensation package worth $57 million; the Steiner scandal was a “consideration” in his departure, the company has said.

These morally bankrupt parasites somehow get in situations where they get rewarded when things go well and when things go catastrophically wrong under their watch. I wonder what you would have to do as a CEO to actually get fired without getting a huge sack of cash, murder someone in broad daylight?

200 years ago, if the people in power were acting up, the people had the capacity to act...and they did. Heads fucking rolled. And not just some heads, but a lot of heads. Present day, the state is more powerful than people 200 years ago could even begin to conceive of. We have trillion dollar companies that literally do whatever they want. The people have little recourse to do anything anymore (there's a panoply of reasons as to why that's the case, but that's besides the point). We inherently know violent resolution is not the way to go...but let's be honest: nonviolent resolutions aren't working anymore.

[0] which, again, it is worth noting that free speech is what gives them the right to control what is on their platform.

Freedom of speech and freedom of the press do not include a right to use somebody else's press. Or the right to override somebody else's freedom of association.

That's the inconvenient thing about rights: other people have them too.