Personal Identifiable Information on the Internet and Online Shopping (E-Commerce)

Online shopping is one of the biggest conveniences about using the internet. The idea of e-commerce came around in the early 1970s and in 1981 the first online marketplace was born. E-commerce is still a constantly evolving idea and technology. It’s a great idea for businesses wishing to expand to more people around the globe. The majority people that participate in online shopping have a good experience overall and positive view of the idea according to research (Saleh, 2013). However, there are still some that are concerned with buying merchandise on the web, especially the older generation that was born before the advent of the internet.
The biggest problem that plagues online marketplaces is the risk of identity theft. Identity theft is still a major concern for financial institutions and online businesses. It’s still such a big problem that even the US Attorney General, Eric Holder, urged congress to establish a set of guidelines for companies in the event that a customer’s personal identifiable information be stolen (Douglas, 2014), which came after the result of Targets servers being breached by hackers and having over 40 million customer records (including addresses, phone numbers, and even credit/debit card information) (Osborne, 2014). Currently there are only state guidelines as to how companies deal with data breaches, but the federal government is working on changing that.
There’s no doubt that as the internet continues to grow and more people gain access to the internet there will also be an increase in cybercrime. This includes phishing, where cyber criminals pose as legitimate businesses and companies online in order to steal information from consumers. The majority of phishers try to lure people into clicking a URL that looks similar to one they’ve been using to access the original website and sometimes even making the webpage look similar to the actual page, but in reality the page is fraudulent and instead the user would be sending their

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