Another Blowback for vintage passport collectors

Vintage passport collectors have received another blowback, as online platform Delcampe announced a recent update to their terms and conditions prohibiting the sale of government-issued identification papers. While certain historical documents will still be allowed, the criteria for determining what is allowable remains vague and open to interpretation by Delcampe's teams.

"Official documents issued by a government, including identification papers, documents containing personal information (e.g. birth certificates). However, certain historical documents will be allowed. The Delcampe teams will determine what is allowable based on the legislation in effect."

The platform was for many years tolerant with such documents. Unfortunately, like eBay, they mainly don't make a difference between a vintage (historical) passport or an expired current passport type. The statement that certain historical documents will be allowed is too soft and too undefined. I doubt DC will know which legislation for such documents will be in effect in different countries.

I offered DC several times support as an passport history expert, who also is interested to stay always up-to-date with the current laws, because I also challenge governments to make a statement on collecting of vintage passports . Some statements you can read here. However, this topic is not DC's focus, which I can understand. Their main category is on stamps and postcards, that's where they make their money.

This comes just after eBay purges vintage passports in mid February on all of their websites. The website valueaddedresource.net reported on the issue.

Currently there appear to be over 4000 of these items for sale on Delcampe. Presumably the moderators and admin staff will begin to close these items and issue warnings to those selling them because not everyone pays much attention to terms and condition updates so will have no idea of the rule changes!

I would think that there are privacy issues involved with publically exposing personel data.
The Mexican passport you offer,is acase in point. You are expose the lady"s age birthplace photo etc
This person might easily be alive.It seems it is a very fine line.

ALL-CLEAR:
In an emailed statement, the online platform Delcampe clarified that "Historical Documents," which includes government-issued identification such as passports, may still be sold on their website provided that they are at least a decade past their expiration date.

Miranda from Delcampe wrote:

"Hi Tom,
I can confirm you that we are not going to change anything about our policy on passports. The 10-year limit still stands as well. We are not currently planning to create a category for the selling of those items, which can be put under the category "Historical documents".

The recent announcement of changes to Delcampe's Terms and Conditions, specifically section 5.1.2, has caused some confusion regarding the sale of historical documents. The platform has stated that the eligibility of such documents will be determined by the Delcampe team based on current legislation.

Agree, it's a grey line with personal data. On the other hand what can you do with those 80 years old data? People are sometimes too sensitive. As a matter of fact, only the person in question can demand to delete such pictures/data. It never happened in 20+ years.