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You need to be sure that you’re truly protected when making online payments. This may be when registering for classes, purchasing books, or ordering study supplies online. Before entering your credit card or contact information into any web page, be sure that you trust the vendor and that you’re entering your information on a secure site. There’s a quick way to ensure that the site you’re viewing is secure: Look at its website address. If the letter s appears after http in the address, you're visiting a secure site.

For example, if you visit Amazon.com to look at items to buy, you can see that the address, http://www.amazon.com, always starts with http://. This is because you're simply looking and you aren’t being asked to share private information. However, when you’re ready to check out and make a payment, you can see that http://www.amazon.com changes to https://www.amazon.com. This means that you’re now connected securely and that any information you share is private between you and Amazon.com.

The following screen shots provide examples of unsecure and secure websites. Figure 3-4 shows an example of a site that’s on an unsecure page. Notice how the site address, also known as the URL, begins with http. Figure 3-5 shows a secure page of the same site. Notice how its URL begins with https. The letter s means secure. Don't forget to check for it before sharing private information, especially financial information. As this example shows, websites don’t need to secure every page, only those where private information is being entered or displayed.

FIGURE 3-4: A sample URL of a secure site.