Privacy (Spam) and Security (Payment) Issues when ordering on the internet or joining porn sites
Precautions necessary? Not urgent, but caution is better!
Many people just use their normal credit cards and their normal email addresses to order merchandise or memberships to sites on the internet. I myself did that frequently. And most of the time this works out all right and causes no problem. I have done it myself.
I am more worried about email spam then about credit card fraud. Normally you can get your money back in case of incorrect credit card charges. But once your email is on spammers’ email list, you can not get off the spammers’ list again.
This is a nice site to get an email just for a week or so! http://www.hidemyass.com/anonymous-email/
You can also open a hotmail, gmail, yahoo account just for ordering. If it gets spam, you close it down. Use funny long names asdferdsafasdfi@ …
Keep reading and click on “more”
Most companies want to earn money doing honest business. But occasionally there are black sheep. And some people prefer to err on the side of caution.
Privacy issues: spam
Get an additional email address for internet shopping
I suggest you get a separate free email address like hotmail.com or gmail.com or yahoo.com for your internet shopping, message boards, and other places where your email could be picked up and used for spamming your inbox with undesired email.
Even more so for porn and sex websites. Most of them are honest and serious, but some black sheep might just sell your email address and suddenly your email is flooded with spam.
So if you want to be careful, get yourself an email address just for the purpose of ordering things on the internet.
This reminds me: I myself need to get another email address. One of my old ones is totally overloaded with spam.
Security issues: your personal information and credit card information can be stolen
Security Issue: monthly rebilling, subscription cancellation
When you sign up for a website: Read the small print.
Usually it reads: “For your convenience you will be billed monthly until cancelled”. Make sure you are aware of this and you cancel if you desire to stop your subscription. Make sure you find a link for cancellation. Cancel a few days early.
Make sure you take a note of the cancellation information. Copy the cancellation information from your computer screen and paste it into a text file. Make sure you get an email confirmation of your cancellation.
Paypal.com has a special service: you can create a temporary credit card just for the purpose of making one payment. The card expires shortly thereafter and will not allow any future charges by anyone.
Still, you should take care of cancelling your subscription. Otherwise you actually do have a subscription and your credit card does not pass, which might be considered incorrect behavior.
Secure credit cards
If your credit card gets charged incorrectly, you can usually initiate a charge back and get your money back. But it is cumbersome and it also can get your credit card blacklisted by merchants, so you have trouble making future orders. So prevention is always useful.
Paypal introduces the secure debit card and a browser plugin
FAQ: Questions about secure card. Whenever you do a payment, you create a new card just for that purpose.
Here a report about the card Paypal secure card, . It mentions that Citibank has a similar service and google checkout seems to have similar features. I have not studied these two alternatives.
Unfortunately, I am not sure what people in other countries can do, that do not qualify for these cards.
Powered by FireStats