Shopping online makes the holiday buying season so much easier for many of us. The National Retail Federation expected more than 121 million consumers to make purchases online for Cyber Monday, which means nearly 50% of shoppers were planning on buying using the Internet.
Although typing in personal information and having the items miraculously arrive at your door or directly to your recipient’s door is fabulous! However, leaving all kinds of data about yourself on various websites may not be the safest way to shop.
Risks and Protections When Online Shopping
There are some inherent risks with online shopping, even when shopping for Cape Coral luxury homes. Retailers try their best to protect customers by incorporating security measure, but hackers and identity theft experts are continually prowling the Internet to find ways of breaking through firewalls and encryption techniques.
As a buyer, there are some things you can do to help keep your personal information and identity safe.
1. Check out the URL Address.
When shopping online, you typically select items that automatically are sent to an online cart. When you are ready to check out and you click on the checkout button, be sure to look at the Web address listed at the top of your browser. You should the “http” change to “https” if the site is using security layers to protect its shoppers. You might also see a small padlock icon appear, which indicates security layers.
If neither of those things are evident then you should probably take your personal information and shop for Cape Coral luxury homes elsewhere. It really isn’t worth the risk, which could end up costing you dearly.
2. Choose the Information Released Carefully.
Emails, websites, and other online pages may ask us to innocently fill in our name, email addresses, zip code, and phone number. Along with this information, the site already knows what you may have searched for, like Cape Coral luxury homes. All this information together can help build a marketing profile that is designed to get you to buy. That’s not so bad, but if this information gets into the hands of a cybercriminals, it can end up being a financial disaster for you.
When you are entering information online, carefully consider whether you need to answer a question or not, keeping in mind that you don’t know how this information is going to be used. One thing for sure, you need to be extremely careful who you give your Social Security number, banking information, or driver’s license numbers to when online.
3. Credit Monitoring.
If you do a lot of online shopping, you may want to sign up for a credit monitoring service that will keep track of how your personal information is being used online.
Credit monitoring services will notify you anytime someone signs up for an account using your name or with your personal information, like Cape Coral luxury homes addresses. You will want to keep a close
eye on your bank account, especially during the holiday shopping season, to ensure any purchases logged are ones you have actually made.
4. Update Passwords.
You’ve heard this before, but it is so true. You need to change your passwords periodically to ensure your information stays secure.
One way to do this is to use an acronym to help you remember a difficult password that would nearly impossible for a hacker to decipher. For example, the acronym: LOVE could actually help you remember the password: Leave0nlyValidExplanations with the capital 0 being a zero.
