C’mon fellow mouseketeers… we, like dear Annette and Cubby of years gone by, are no longer virgins (well, web virgins anyway)! Grab that Chastity belt! Katie, bar the door! Lock up your sons and daughters. Raise the drawbridge! Fill the moat! Stock it w/ pirhana if necessary! Its time we talk about data protection! (eeek!). Where does that data go? Where is it stored? How does it get there? Who’s doing what with it?

Data Protection? Yup! It’s one of the major stumbling blocks to e-commerce. If, as a visitor, you don’t feel that your information is safe and/or secure, then you won’t use the web (and provide your credit card) to buy “stuff”… our “stuff” (or our clients’ “stuff”)! Many of us think that (as illustrated by the young lady to the left) if the server is secure… if it has a good firewall, then the data stored there is safe. And while no system is 100% “secure”, this is generally a valid thought process. However, many companies doing e-commerce are NOT doing it on their own servers but are hosting their sites on third-party servers (like IFI). This is especially true of small to medium sized companies on the net. While many hosts (like IFI) do maintain a high level of server security for their clients, much of the e-commerce data is NOT actually stored on the host server! It arrives at the website from your browser, is manipulated in some fashion by the clients’ application and then is RE-transmitted to the client in a form more compatible to their process. Read the rest of this entry »