Tips for Safe Holiday Shopping
If you have discovered the convenience of avoiding the crush of Holiday shopping by making purchases on the Internet and having them conveniently delivered to your home, then you may have wondered from time to time about the security of information the on-line shops ask you to provide. Conveniences aside, when shopping on-line at any time of the year, your primary concern should be to protect your personally identifying information. We would like to make you aware of various ways of how to do this.
If you want to pay online for a product or a service and you have to enter credit card information or other personal information think about the following:
- You should know exactly what Website you are on!
- Think about the amount and detail of information being requested. Does it correspond to what you think is needed to make your purchase or to set up an account on that website?
- Understand why the information is being requested and how it will be used.
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When any site requests information about you, ask these questions:
- Who is asking?
- What information are they asking for?
- Why do they need it?
- Double check if your browser is viewing a secure web site. In the lower right part of the window, there is a small box to the left of the photoarea that describes which zone you are in on your browser (typically the Internet zone, with a globe icon). If you see a yellow padlock icon, the web site you are viewing is a "secure web site." If the box is empty, the web site does not have a secure connection with your browser.
- The certificate that is used to encrypt the connection also contains information about the identity of the website owner or organization. You can click the lock to view the identity of the website. If the Web address in the URL it starts with [https://], you are on a secured page. The ‘s’ stands for ‘secure’. If the URL starts with http://, you are not on a secured page.