If you are connected to an ebay developer account and have, like me, barely managed to meet the dead-line, then you will have seen about 120,000 deletion requests until today (Dec. 12th 2021). Here they are:

Well, they come in and in. Steadily. About 50 per hour on average. On Oct. 10th there was a short outage but the requests seem to have been sent right after. In general, ebay customers seem to request the deletion service pretty uniformly.

We can also look at the amount per weekday and hour-of-day. For comparison, some sales numbers on ebay from the same period are included. The products are basic clothes sold in Germany and abroad and the amount is not really 50 per hour but high enough to make a fair comparison.

Saturday and Wednesday seem to be the most popular days to delete one’s ebay account, while Sunday is certainly the online-shopping-day.

A lot of speculation arises from the hour-of-day plot. First of all, there is so much account-deletion activity through the whole night that i actually doubt that all timestamps are UTC, or that maybe some timezones are incorrectly converted. However. Maybe it’s just a fun thing to do at 3 A.M.?

The first peak of the day is at 9 for sales and 10 for deletions. Well, are you employed, Mr. Lebowski?. On other sales channels i often noticed that the first thing many people do on Monday mornings–presumably just arrived at the office–is buying stuff online. Anyways. The major peak for sales is 6 P.M. which seems sensible. However, account deletion requests start to grow at 2 P.M., as if that’s what you do after lunch break. Honey, today i was quite unconcentrated at work. I couldn’t do much so i deleted our ebay account.

Looking at the next plot, this after-lunch-break-behaviour seems to be particularily pronounced on Wednesdays. You know, i’m not a fan of hard regular office work and i like bumming around but i certainly do something else with that precious time than logging in to ebay. No, that’s not a matter of taste! Get your fucking slack back! And no! Your data is not deleted from all over the planet with your deletion request. You just make yourself ridiculous.