As a buyer on ebay, MY biggest worry now with the scrambling of bidder IDs, for "privacy purposes" is seller shill bidding.
I mean, they take away the seller's ability to give negative feedback... (which I feel is not right. Some buyers do deserve it.) this in essence hurts the seller. I mean, before a little disagreement COULD be solved without the seller getting slammed with a negative because the buyer felt scared of getting one back. (Yes, I know it works to protect an honest buyer against a dishonest seller, but I'm solely looking at it from the good seller's point of view for the purposes of this point I'm trying to make.) Now, a buyer can leave a negative for ANY purpose, the item arrived damaged? Why bother emailing the seller first? NEGATIVE!
NOW, so that buyers are not left out in the cold, let's make it easy for sellers to get back at them for now being left open to free negatives by... making shill bidding easy! As a buyer you now can't see who you're bidding against!
Forget about bidders helping each other out. Same me and you are into , oh I don't know, SMURFS, and we see the same auction. We're friends, I see you bid, I back off, you get it for a good price. NOW... you bid, I bid, one of us ends up paying more than we would have before.
Just like with the feedback thing, where it can work to protect the honest buyer against the dishonest seller, I guess the point of scrambling the buyer IDs is to protect the honest seller against the dishonest bidders (me and you helping each other out to get something cheaper thereby preventing the true market to determine price.
)
But still, it just doesn't sit right with me.
Oh heck, I don't know.
Maureen 
