eBay UK User Agreement Child Protection, Illegal & Harmful Content Updates Effective July 22, 2025
eBay UK is updating their User Agreement to comply with regulations regarding protecting children from illegal and harmful content, effective July 22, 2025.
As always, sellers are encouraged to read the entire updated terms carefully, but Value Added Resource has you covered with a side by side comparison highlighting some key changes.
Disclaimer: comparisons are made using both automated and manual methods and are provided for informational purposes only - no warranty of completeness or accuracy is expressed or implied and users are advised to do their own due diligence.
All of the updated language appears to be centered around compliance with upcoming new laws and regulations regarding protecting children from illegal and harmful content.
For example, in multiple places throughout the T&C, the term "illegal content" has been changed to "illegal content or content harmful to children."
A new section called Protecting Children has been added to the terms, which says:
Protecting Children
You should be aged 18 or over to access and use eBay. However, to protect children from encountering content on eBay which could be harmful to them, various categories of content are prohibited under our Prohibited and restricted items policy.
The section which states that eBay may use algorithms (including AI) to evaluate keywords, images and other criteria during the listing creation process; flag listings for review by eBay investigators or in some cases automatically block them from being published; and conduct manual and AI sweeps on existing content have not changed - but eBay added an additional section with more detail about the specific kinds of content they look for as part of their efforts to protect children.
We implement these safeguards in a way which we consider to be proportionate to the risk that listings might pose to other users of the Services – for instance as part of our measures to protect children from content that might be harmful to them we use proactive filters and undertake more regular sweeps for the following categories of content ("primary priority content"):
- pornographic content
- content which encourages, promotes or provides instructions for suicide
- content which encourages, promotes or provides instructions for an act of deliberate self-injury and
- content which encourages, promotes or provides instructions for an eating disorder or behaviours associated with an eating disorder.
Aside from these sections and various changes of "illegal content" to "illegal content or content harmful to children" there does not appear to be any other significant changes in this eBay UK User Agreement update.
These updates follow changes made in March for the UK which also took aim at illegal content and criminal activity on the site.
Liz Morton
The fact that additional updates were made to be more explicit about illegal content which is harmful to children could indicate eBay may have received pushback from UK regulators that the previous language was too vague and didn't properly comply with legal requirements, including the Online Safety Act.
Department for Science, Innovation and Technology
Importantly, these changes only apply to the eBay.co.UK site - the main .com US site and other localized eBay sites for other countries have so far not updated to include the same language.
However, that may change as the EU could soon be taking action to hold marketplaces liable for illegal and harmful products sold through their sites and eBay joins other marketplaces in lobbying to fight against similar proposed laws and regulations in the US.
Liz Morton
Bottom line on this User Agreement update for the UK: there isn't much that most users will need to be concerned about here and not much will be changing in terms of how most sellers conduct day to day business on the site, but with increased regulatory scrutiny, eBay is also increasingly turning to AI solutions to monitor and enforcement policy compliance - with sometimes mixed results and more room for false positives.
Liz Morton
Unfortunately, the bots don't always get it right and when they don't, sellers are often left with little recourse, severely lacking customer support, and no way to effectively appeal policy violation strikes or item take downs which are made in error - so keep a close eye on your account and let us know in the comments below if you see an uptick in erroneous AI-enabled enforcement once these updates go into effect!
