Guide to Safe Shopping
Shopping on the internet can be both simple and fun. However, if you are not careful, you could also be handing your credit card details to anybody. If you fill in an online form, the data sent to the web site will not by default be encrypted. This means that somebody could intercept your data and extract your credit card number.
Fortunately, there is a simple solution to this, and it is called SSL security. This does to things:
- Encryption
SSL encrypts any data sent between your PC and the web server, so nobody can read you credit card number. - Authentication
SSL ensures that the web site is who they say they claim to be.
There are three ways of identifying that SSL security is being used.
- The URL will begin with https://
- There will be a secure padlock visible in the status bar.
In IE7 it looks like this:
If you click the padlock, you should be told who the site actually is.
It is also worth noting who has authenticated the site. In our case, as you can see, we are authenticated by Starfield Technologies Inc.
- The website will tell you!
It costs money to have an authenticated SSL certificate, so the website will want to tell you about it. In our case, we give you the icon below to click for validation. If you click it you will see our certificate, after a short pause.
Not all of the Glamourous Gowns site uses SSL encryption; we just use it for the payment process
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