As Canadian ecommerce continues to grow, becoming a more important economic generator, issues of online privacy grow in tandem with it. While encryption technology continues to be developed, those crafty hackers and pirates are training hard like an internet Taliban to strike where they will. So what are the steps we take to ensure protection of our personal finances online? And how do we secure these increasingly common transactions? You can sleep sound in bed knowing that the last thing you bought online was protected by an army of guys just like Chuck Norris, working in the shadows to protect your identity in the global online marketplace. Coding is their martial art.

Public key infrastructure is a first order security step, where a message is encrypted by a public key, but only one who holds a password can decrypt it through their private key. Other steps are confirmation numbers for example. Or those funky words with the bent letters that computers can’t read because they’ve never done acid or mushrooms and aren’t familiar with experiencing a troubling and warped state of mind; just to make up a random example.

Digital Signatures and Time Stamps are also measures. Time stamps log progress or more accurately log when events occurred or a file was accessed and can be looked over for inconsistencies. Digital Signatures are handwritten signatures on e-mails or other documents that in some countries carry the same legal legitimacy as ink signatures on paper, and in some countries the same legitimacy as smeared oxblood on parchment, or a sack full of decorative clamshells, or other exchange and notary methods.

Secure socket layers are my personal favorite. This is akin to breaking the message into parts and sending it through different routes, all ending up at the same destination. TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol) discusses or negotiates keys with the user that are used to verify information and pass it through. It almost sounds as complicated and labor intensive as discussing environmental issues with an Albertan.

These are just a few ways that we work hard to protect ourselves from the ruthless scum who try to steal our personal information and incur more transaction costs in the fast growing medium of exchange we’ve come to know and love called e-commerce. Thank goodness we have an army of unseen heroes, each worth at least one Chuck Norris in their software coding capabilities, working to protect us.

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Related posts:

1. A new ecommerce player about to Glyde onto the scene
2. Massive Vancouver debit card fraud reminds consumers to be careful both online and in person
3. The Great Firewall of China extends a little further

Tags: Canadian ecommerce, Chuck Norris, online privacy, software coding

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