Gadgetory

hey everyone welcome to the inside scoop I'm cnet's Cairo tsuboi joined by senior editor Seth Rosenblatt hi Cara hey Seth so now that thanksgiving is over in the holiday shopping season has officially begun a lot of us will be online shopping of course yes I understand that you've got some tips on how to shop safely online absolutely or at least more safely sure first tip is with your passwords change them if you haven't most people don't change their passwords regularly enough yeah I recommend choosing a password that is at least four random words with spaces in between I'd never even knew you could have spaces between your words and your password it turns out that you can and what that allows you to do is have a more secure password that you can remember more easily computer logic has a more difficult time discerning what those spaces are and so you don't really need all these you know characters like ! sore at marks or whatever just choose something that's easy to remember and has spaces in it so there's at least four words or so good to change passwords for email bank account shopping site absolutely another tip VPN a lot of people will have a work provided VPN you can use that if you don't have one of those you can use a free VPN like hotspot shield or logmein hamachi and what that does is that encrypt your network traffic in a tunnel so that's more secure mmm that's a good tip and what about when we're browsing various shopping sites what should we look for or not look for absolutely two things I recommend when it comes to browsing is one used two different browsers keep your mission critical information in one browser keep your shopping in another browser I like to use Firefox and Chrome for that doesn't matter which one you use for which as long as they're separate and the second tip is to make sure that you have HTTPS in the URL bar in the location bar and that you also see a green badge when you're on a shopping site like Amazon right just to know it's legit and secure absolutely and finally when it comes to payment one method is far better than another absolutely I prefer using a credit card for my online payments because if anything goes wrong I can always get some redress from the credit card company right it's not like the money just are already disappeared from your bank account absolutely yeah yeah thank you so much thank you appreciate the tips Happy Holidays Happy Holidays this is Seth Rosenblatt I'm car tsuboi thanks for watching the inside scoop