Importance of Privacy

Protecting your information is important. It can be used by others from tracking your shopping/usage patterns to committing fraud and identify theft. While tracking by marketers is relatively begien, use of your information for fraud can be very serious.

Protecting Sensitive Information

There are several things you can do to protect your personal information.

• Make sure sites you submit sensitive information, particularly sensitive information, are both trusted and encrypted. Look for SSL indicators, as well as make sure sure that the certificate is valid. Most browsers will show an error if the certificate has expired or is invalid.
• Dont follow links in unsolicted email. These emails may be fake and bring you to a phishing site.
• Buy from well known and trusted retailers.

Purpose of SSL

Secure Socket Layer (SSL) serves two purposes when used on a website. The first to to provide a key to encrypt all information send back and forth over a connection. This keeps the data secure between your computer and the computer you are communicating with. The second purpose is to have a third party validate the site that they are an actual business. You can contact the certificate provider for more information about the certificate.

Phishing

The act of phishing is trying to coerce information such as bank account, paypal or ebay logins through email and websites that appear legitimate, but are faked to get users to follow them. Sometimes this is even done with fake charity donation sites. The best thing to do to protect yourself in this situation, is to never follow links from an email to a site, but access the site directly yourself. Also you want to make sure that the site is using an SSL certificate that has been granted to the company that owns the site.

For more information about phishing, refer to this article.

If you need to talk to a customer service representative, please call us at (952) 215 - 3781.