Protect Your Customers Data

September 22, 2006

Any service, company, website, or other means of taking in personal information comes with the responsibility to protect that information. Protecting customer information doesn’t stop at a template privacy policy for your customers to read. There are several ways you can protect your customers information.

Protect the Password

Just because a password is in a database, doesn’t mean it’s protected. In fact, if you are on a shared hosting plan it might be more vulnerable that you think. You need to protect your password, better yet you should one way hash them so they are not able to be recovered. When a user enters a username and password you can hash the password they enter and compare it to the hashed password in the database. This way if anyone gets a hold of your database, the passwords are useless.

Encrypt Personal Information

Credit cards are a must, but you should go a step further and encrypt phone numbers, addresses, zip codes, and other personal information.

Get a Secure Certificate

Yes, they can be expensive; but these days you should not be doing business with out one. Once you have a certificate on your server, make sure you use it correctly. Any input of personal data should go though the certificate. Furthermore, you should make sure that it is impossible to go to that page when not going through ‘https://’.

Conclusion

I am always dumb founded when I come across a site that does not practice any security measure with sensitive data. The longer you wait to implement solutions, the harder it becomes to upgrade your data and systems.

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