Giving out your information on the internet is very dangerous. All it takes for someone to access your credit card online is your name and number. For someone to get a loan out in your name is your address and social security number. How do people steal this information? Email scams, hacking, and fake sites are just three of the many ways.
A theft will often send out an email pretending to be from a credible company or site asking for your information. Most sites that take personal information warn you that they will never email you for the information, but many people do not know this. How do you protect yourself against email scams? The easiest way is to simply not give out your personal information over email. A more practical approach is to validate the email first, go to the site where it claims to have come from. Is it somewhere you should be giving personal information, for instance your bank? Does the site say it will ever ask you for personal information by email? If the answer to either of these questions is no, do not give out your information.
Shopping online is easy, but due to identity theft it can be very dangerous. A good idea is to use pay pal or stored value cards to pay for your purchases. Using pay pal and stored value cards allows you to control the amount of money a thief can hack into. Instead of putting your whole credit card at risk you can put only what is necessary for your purchase on the pay pal account of stored value card. If you do not feel comfortable with those options you should try and keep all your online purchases on one credit card and get watch your banking statements.
Two things you can look at before you give out information to a site are digital certificates and its privacy policy. Digital certificates show that a site has achieved a certain level of safety and tell you about where the site is coming from. The privacy policy will tell you what the site is allowed to do with the information you give it. These documents are often long, wordy, and frankly a pain to read, but it is very important that you do. You would want to know if you were about to give a site permission to sell your personal information.
A very simple thing you can do to keep yourself safe is to be aware. Read your emails and the news, you might see warnings about scams or frauds. Become aware of anti virus and hacking software. Do not go to 'bad' sites. And most importantly exercise common sense when you tell anyone any personal information.
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