Gift shopping online is convenient and comfortable. Although, have you ever paused before making a payment at an online site? You sit there wondering if your credit card and personal information will really be kept safe? I shop quite often online and I can tell you that I’ve never personally had a problem.
Well, I was just browsing the internet last night and came across some great advice for shopping online. I really wanted to share this info with you because it’s so incredibly important. Here are a few handy guidelines to keep your personal information secure.
Gift shopping online - How to stay safe
Tips for Gift Shopping Online
1. It’s always safer to use your home computer. Just be a little wary of computers in public areas. There could be spyware on them that gives other users access to your financial information.
2. Type in the retailer’s online web address rather than clicking through a link in an e-mail from the retailer. This will prevent you from being reeled in by a “phisher”. A “phisher” uses a fake Web address and e-mail that pretends to be a real site. What may happen is, if you click “reply” on one of these phony e-mail messages, you are sent to the phony site where crooks can steal your passwords and financial information.
3. Always look for the padlock or a color bar at the bottom of an online retailer’s Web site. This way you know that the information you enter is encrypted so no one can copy it. Here’s a picture of the padlock. I could not find a pic of the colored bar. Sorry!
4. Use a password manager. Using this software makes it easy to store multiple passwords. With it you only have to remember only one master password. My personal favorite is Roboform. It’s well recognized and has set industry standards. You can use it free for a month and then you will need to pay around $30 for the license. There is a free password manager called KeePass.com.
There are different password managers with different encryptions. Make sure the password manager specifies the type of encryption. It should have the letters AES — for Advanced Encryption Standard. This tells you that it meets the highest standard available. The best ones are 256 bit encryption which means it’s the most secure. Roboform has the 256 bit encryption size.
How does a password manager work? You just download it and it sits in your browser. The first time you sign into an account of any kind the password manager asks if you want to save your username and password. You then give the username/password a name so you can locate it in the password manager.
It sits safe and secure on your browser along with the web address of your login pages. When you want to log into a site, just click into the password manager and scroll down until you see the name you gave your login information and it goes automatically to the site and logs in for you. Just beware if anyone else logs onto the same home computer as you. You will have to set the master password and use it everytime.
Safe Shopping Tips
5. Create passwords that are complex. I know it’s easy to have one password for all your accounts but its really not safe.
Steve Furman, director of e-commerce for Discover Financial Services warns “It’s particularly important to use a different password for your MySpace or Facebook account, “Social Web sites make an effort to protect your information, but they’re not as secure as the banks.”
6. You can use a single use credit card number. This is an excellent idea. Citibank, Bank of America, and Discover offer these numbers to cardholders. It’s called the ShopSafe program. How it works is that you receive a number that is linked to your account but is not your actual credit card number. It keeps your true account number off the Web and out of merchant databases by generating a random, substitute number in its place.
Here’s the difference in how the different banks handle the Shop Safe Program.
- Discover and Bank of America let you use one number to make multiple purchases from the same merchant.
- Citibank’s virtual account numbers can be used only once.
- Bank of America’s ShopSafe program is available only to its Visa and MasterCard account holders who bank online. Unfortunately it’s American Express cardholders can’t use the service.
7. Top search engine results are much more secure sites than those further down the list. If you’re doing searches on the net its better to select sites higher up the list as possible on the first page of results. I always trust Google for doing searches. They seem to have weeded out the bad spammy sites and always have good, safe search results. Of course the more vague your search term is, the less websites Google has to pull from their search engine.
Gift shopping online is wonderfully quick and convenient. Oh how I love to shop in my jammies! It just takes a few minutes to get in the habit of protecting your personal info.
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