September 23rd, 2007 by Skip McGrath

On September 17th, eBay announced that users will have one sign in that will cover the whole site (including discussion boards, and other community areas as well as the buying/selling areas). In the announcement, Rachel Makool said:

“This small change should not only save you time, but should also improve your account security, since you’ll no longer have to remember to sign out of both your main account and the Community area when you leave your computer.”

And here is where I get a little concerned. How many people actually knew they had to sign out of both areas previous to this change? True, we all knew that we had to sign in again when we wanted to enter the area, but most people assumed that was a simple security feature (like when you go to sell an item). So, for the last who knows how many years, we’ve all been assuming that when we click “sign out” it actually does sign us out of all of eBay, not just the area we are currently in.

So, yes, it’s a good change, but it would have been nice to know that at least that area of our accounts were open to other people if we didn’t sign out twice. I doubt that anyone could get into My eBay or other areas like that without resigning in, but still this is a little worrying.