Safeguarding Your Privacy Online

Your right to privacy should be very important to you and your family. The Internet, Usenet (newsgroups), bulletin boards and e-mail can be damaging to your personal privacy. It is up to you to make the decision to control the personally identifiable information that is gathered when you are using the Internet and when you make online purchases. You can safeguard your information by learning about privacy policies, privacy seals, securing your data, protecting your e-mail, username and passwords, internet options on your computer and about cookies and the collection and dissemination of your personal information.

Privacy Policies and Seals:
Look for a privacy policy on the site you are visiting. What information do they keep, sell, rent, or lease? Are you willing to let your potentially valuable information be sold to marketing companies? Most sites provide free information in exchange for an e-mail address. In most cases, an option is available to you to receive "promotional e-mail" from the company and/or their affiliates.
A credible privacy policy should be easily accessible and easy to understand. The policy should also give you the option to restrict distribution of your information to 3rd parties. You can further protect yourself by looking for a privacy seal on the site. To receive a seal and certification, a site must abide by their privacy policies and comply with the rules of the governing seal. BBBonline and TRUSTe are two well-known nonprofits promoting the principles of disclosure and informed consent.
Take a minute to click on the seals and follow their link. Make sure that the companies is certified by the BBB or TRUSTe and are not using the graphic on their site to trick you. If the site is taking deceptive measures to gain your business, take your business elsewhere.

Data Security
Don't give out sensitive data - including (but not limited to) phone #, SSN, Credit Card numbers, address, mother's maiden name, date of birth. Very few companies need your social security number. Keep it private! Keep your mother's maiden name a secret too. No one needs to know this information unless they are verifying your identity after you solicited their help.

Make sure the site is secure before submitting any sensitive information like credit card numbers. Secure sites are encrypted with SSL (secure sockets layer). SSL technology takes a message (containing your sensitive data) and runs it through a set of steps that scrambles the message (Encryption). This is done so that the message cannot be read while it is being transferred. When the intended recipient receives the message, SSL unscrambles the message, checks that it came from the correct sender (Authentication) and then verifies that it has not been tampered with (Message Integrity).

Signs to identify a secure site:
•The secure web page should have https://www… in the URL instead of just http://www…
•The secure web page will contain an icon that looks like a padlock in the status bar
•A prompt from the browser (unless you have turned this feature off) will pop up and say that you are entering (and later exiting) a secure site

Protect your e-mail address:
The convenience of the Internet includes the ability to send and receive e-mail. With this convenience, though, are some annoyances. Some of these are: Junk Mail (aka SPAM), Nuisances, Mail Bombs, MLM Scams, Jokes, Hoaxes, Chain Letters and Virus Alerts. Some of these messages are sent to you by legitimate people; your friends, co-workers, etc. But they aren't necessarily good for your inbox. Take for example the amount of jokes, hoaxes, little lost girls, and virus alerts that come through your e-mail. These can all be considered nuisances. Nothing to be concerned about, right? Wrong!. You want to protect your privacy right? Look at the header of the next e-mail that comes through with the words "Pass along to all your friends!" How many e-mail addresses can you see? If it promises good luck, fortune, etc for the sender, you probably see dozens. Who are these other people? Consider them POTENTIAL SPAMMERS! Bottom line - do yourself a favor and ask your friends to stop sending you junk. You probably have seen most of it anyway.

If you use AOL you are probably well acquainted with these senders: spammers, mail bombers, MLM scams. These people buy and rent your address from the sites you registered at. Now, if you checked their privacy policies and notified them you don't want to receive notices, there shouldn't be any spam in your box, right? Wrong Again! Spammers do more than just buy or rent mailing lists. They spy on you. Do you recall the last time you logged on to a chat room, message board or bulletin board? Have you tried Usenet yet? Visited a high school reunion site, personals section or used Yahoo Messenger? There are tons of utilities out there for you to meet and talk with people from around the world. These sites are danger zones for you if you want to maintain some kind of privacy on the Net. Spammers are harvesting e-mail addresses out of these sites using "bot" or "spider" technology - very similar to the technology that makes a search engine work. What happens when you get spam? Whatever you do, do not reply to the spammer using "Remove" in the subject line (the method they actually want you to do). Once you reply to the spammer they know they have a "live one" and they will take any reply as evidence that the account is active and you will never be free. Do yourself a favor and learn how to use the filtering component of your e-mail program and begin using the delete button.

If you can't live without your daily chats and posts, your best bet is to get yourself a free account (Hotmail, Yahoo, Juno, etc) for use when in chat rooms, message boards and the like. Make the address completely unidentifiable by using some obscure pattern of letters and numbers. Or you can use a popular method to trick the spiders by entering your e-mail address like this: joe AT yahoo DOT com. That way your friends can decipher it and the spiders will bypass it. CLICK HERE to learn more about email.

Passwords and Cookies
While using the Net, you will encounter "registration only" sites that require you to login each and every time you use it. This allows the site to track your usage using cookies. A cookie is a block of text placed in a file on your hard drive by the site you have visited. Cookies are responsible for identifying you when you create a "personalized page" through companies such as Yahoo and Excite. The cookie does not identify you personally unless it is attached to the results of a form you filled out.

Cookies are not necessarily a privacy evil - they provide quick access to user defined preferences and they allow you to shop online. However, some marketing companies use cookies to track your usage; where you go, how long you stay, what your interests are.

A solution to cookies is simple. You can disable them (requires you to log-in at each site you have customized) or you can have your browser prompt you to accept them. When you have some time, go through your hard drive and look at all the cookies stored there (in your Netscape folder or your Temporary Internet Files folder). It is perfectly safe to delete them.

Passwords control who has access to your e-mail, site preferences and registration only websites. Don't share your passwords with anyone - you will easily lose control of your privacy by giving them out.

When creating passwords, don't use easy to guess passwords - like Mother's maiden name, your birthday, anniversary, etc. Use a combination of letters, numbers, special characters and throw in some different cases, like 2Bw*IE@a9. Don't give your password to anyone ESPECIALLY if someone who says they are from your Internet Service Provider (usual culprit, AOL). THEY HAVE YOUR PASSWORD AND DO NOT NEED TO GET IT FROM YOU!!! Don't save your password on sites if you do not trust them! IE 5.0 and has this nifty feature to save passwords - if you don't trust the site - DON'T SAVE IT! Just remember it - and login each time. Write them down and hide them well.

Internet Options:
Safeguarding your computer through the Internet Options is very important. Internet Options allows you to configure and modify certain settings. You can get to this through the Control Panel on your computer.

Hopefully your interest in online privacy has been increased and you are more aware of what you can do to protect it.