Looking to learn how to protect your privacy online? Privacy is now a great commodity in our today’s world, especially in the internet community. Your private information is always being sort by legitimate companies or businesses and the bad guys. This calls for more carefulness in your internet undertakings, and even more when the issue relates to online payment.
Legitimate businesses and companies online are looking at your private information for marketing purposes and in order to serve your interests better while the bad guys are busy nosing around for your private information for some fraudulent purposes. Curiously, your private information, actually are your information used in payments online. Hence in this article, I am going to be giving out tips on how to protect your online payment with privacy.
With the introduction of the electronic commerce act, making payments online has a lot of advantages, it saves time and effort, it is simple and convenient. But there are some risks you run when you do that.
For instance, you can be defrauded making payment online over an unsecured web page, you are likely going to get emails referring to some fraudulent websites for your transactions.
In the next few paragraphs, I am going to be listing the different ways maintaining privacy will help to safeguard your online payments.
Ways to Protect Your Online Privacy
Browser settings
Most browsers now have the feature that enables one to set the privacy of one’s browser. If you use Firefox, you may want to turn on an incognito browser, which automatically disables cookies and tracking of the websites you visit. So, when you enter your credit card information, your browser does not store it and thereby not making it available for the bad guys online to steal them when you mistakenly click on the numerous bot links online.
You can also turn off your autocomplete setting on your browser, which was meant to automatically fill in identification forms online including your credit card information when you want to make online payments. If you use Chrome to browse, you may go to Settings and click on Show Advanced Settings. Right under the Password section, where you also have the Forms section, simply select Manage Auto-fill Settings.
Right there, you can choose to erase any credit card information you have stored there automatically, then you proceed to uncheck the Enable Auto-fill. That settled, your Chrome browser will no longer be able to fill in web forms automatically.
Tip: Be careful not to click on links in emails from an unknown sender. There’s a lot of spy software that is specifically installed on your computer or mobile to steal data like personal information, passwords, bank account details, etc.
Crosscheck the information you are giving out
Before you confirm an online payment, for the purpose of privacy concerns and security reasons, be sure to confirm the details you are giving out; they must be accurate and smartly done, some people advise that not everything needs to be true of you. Here are some of the things you should look out for and do:
- If you have too much information about you on your social media profile, don’t sign up for the account for online payment.
- Be very selective about giving out your social security number, on certain online payment platforms. These little details can give some leads to finding out more about you.
Verify link security
Verify the Security of the link you are making the payment online before imputing your payment details. Wondering how you can verify whether the online payment platform is secure?
Here are simple steps you need to follow:
- If the site is secure, the web address should start with ‘https’. The ‘s’ means that the site is secure.
- Look out for a security padlock of the site on the address bar. It should be locked to show that the site is secure. Then make sure that this icon does not appear on the web page instead, it probably means that the platform is not secure for online payment.
- Again, always ensure that you are using the latest version of your browser at any point in time. If you are using the latest version of your browser, the name of the site on the address bar should turn when you enter the website.
- Check the website’s privacy policy to acquaint yourself with the kind of protection they offer and whether you are satisfied with it.
Install privacy protection software
Be sure to have an up to date antivirus, antispyware, and firewall, active before you go online, especially while you are making payments online. Or make use of payment platforms like PayPal, Payoneer, etc.
Use strong passwords
Some people feel more comfortable using the same password for different platforms including for their credit card information. Whereas this is easy and convenient, it is not the best and very risky, if your account gets hacked in one platform, the hacker will be able to steal from you everywhere online. So, maintain the privacy of your passwords and make sure you use different passwords or access codes for different platforms. You need not worry about forgetting them, there is software built to help generate strong passwords and manage them online and for such genuine software and use it, especially for your online payment platforms. protect your online privacy
Better still, use a variant of the same password for different online payment platforms, you add %, $, #, & and symbols like this and numbers at some places. Try to select some specific number of them so that if you ever forget, you can always remember at two or three attempts.
Always have a recovery email address or phone number for your username and passwords. You can learn more about recovery email addresses in our article covering how many email accounts you should have.
These are some of the ways to protect your online payment with privacy and make sure you run a lesser risk of being robbed online.
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