Don't be misled. There are various methods of securing website orders just as there are various companines selling security service. The largest company selling that service would have you believe that unless you see a certain icon or letter designation on your URL that there is no security. It actually only means that you are not using their security syetem.
Virtually all web browsers now support Secure Sockets Layer ("SSL") security, which is the most well known. This includes all the Netscape browsers since version 2, and Microsoft Internet Explorer since version 2.1. But that doesn't mean that everyone is willing to pay for their service when there are other, less advertised and less expensive services to use.
Our software provides secure encryption of your information.
Further, your credit card company protects you from false charges to your account.
How encryption works.
If you are interested in how these things work, here is a simple example of how it can be set up. Of course, the system we actually use is a lot more complicated than this, but you wll get the idea. To add further security, we change the security system at unscheduled intervals.
All security systems must encrypt their transmission of data. There is no magic to it. There is just more or less complication to the method. All companies on the internet use the encryption method.
For encryption to work, the sender of the information and the receiver of the information have to use the same code to encrypt and decrypt the message. This is easy when both parties are used to dealing together, such as spies. They will have their set codes.
But, when a customer sends in an order, we have to find a code to use that unkown beforehand. So, for example, we could have the software use the last three letters of the name of your city in the address as a code to encrypt the credit card information, the street address and the zip code. Then when we receive the order, the software can take those same three letters and use it as a code to decrypt the coded message. So each order that comes in will be using a different set of code letters.
Since the computer will follow any directions, we can make it as complicated as we want, so long as we know how we set it up. It might take someone months or years to try to figure out how it was done. And since we change it from time to time, the chances are that while someone is trying to figure out how we do it, before they finish, we don't do it that way anymore. These orders are simply not worth that much work. So, we could have those same three letters, further encoded by the abreviation of the name of your state, that further encoded by the date on which the order was placed, and even further coded by the digital time at which the order was transmitted. There is no end to the complications we could install.
Suffice it to say, in the fourteen years we have been taking internet orders with our encryption system, we have never had a single code broken.
