(From The Sunday Times, 6th September 1998)
ONLINE traders must he tearing their hair out. They spend a year perfecting an online shop front, carefully crafting a site that balances eye-catching design with brilliant functionality, only to find that the public is still too scared to buy, writes Matthew Wall.
There is a maddeningly tenacious belief that sending credit-card details over the Internet is akin to leaving your front door open and inviting burglars in. But shopping online via a secure server is safe already and about to become even safer with the imminent arrival of stronger forms of encryption.
Despite my recent request, not one reader e-mailed me with an online fraud story. There are no recorded instances of credit-card details being unscrambled by criminals. Yet the public remains to be convinced.
NOP's Internet user survey shows that fear over security is still the main reason holding back online shopping. NOP's poll, which involves interviews with 1,000 households, shows that only one-in-l0 web users - about 500,000 people -have shopped online; and numbers are rising slowly.
What people are looking for is a blanket statement from credit-card issuers exonerating them from liability should they fall victim to online fraud. So far such a statement has not been forthcoming, partly because there could be cases where the cardholder is clearly at fault. For example, writing down your online shopping personal identification number and password and sticking them to your PC is not very bright. But card issuers could do more to assuage the public's fear.
Adrian Merrick, director of Digital Fusion, has launched an excellent shopping directory site called Enterprise City (http://www.enterprise.city.co.uk). It provides a jumping-off point for online shoppers, categorising and reviewing 200 online traders that offer secure transactions.
Most online vendors use the common security system, Secure Socket Layers (SSL) from Netscape Communications. This uses 40-bit encryption which means that digital messages are scrambled. This level of security has been cracked many times by hackers linking up powerful computers but so far, criminals have not found it worth the effort. And 128-bit encryption - yet.to be cracked by even the mightiest computers - should become wide-spread here soon. Of course, guarding against your card details being intercepted in transit is one thing, preventing traders misusing your details is another. But this is not a Net problem it is a card problem.
Unscrupulous traders can already get hold of your details in a number of ways. So some shopping sites use systems that automatically route your credit-card details to a financial institution that authorises the transaction immediately and then transfers the funds to the store's bank account. This means the trader never sees your credit-card details, making online shopping even more secure.
So repeat after me: "Online shopping is safe . . . online shopping is safe . .