<Freddo411>: Shudders at the thought of buying things online

/me generally sends a check. Credit cards are risky IRL just as much as online. Every place where you use a credit card, there is the potential for an unscrupulous employee to jot down, memorize, or otherwise keep your number and use it a year later after they've changed jobs twice and you've used your card in dozens of other places. Anything can happen in this scenerio that can happen if your number is stolen online. You can choose not to worry about either scenerio, figuring either that A) it won't happen to you or B) the credit card company will believe it wasn't you and eat the cost or C) God has everything under control and will protect you from any problems that are not his will, but these things are just as true if you use the card online as they are if you use it IRL. (The real reason I send a check though is because I refuse to own a credit card, because they make it too %$@! convenient to spend money all the time. One can nickle and dime oneself into the poor house.)

The thing that's risky about buying online is that if the website is bogus you may not get your merchandise. As yet, I've only had that happen four times, and in each case I was able to get it straightened out (which implies that the site was not, in fact, bogus, merely less than altogether on the ball) and either got the merchandise shipped or got a refund. (Twice I got a refund, and twice the merchandise shipped. Only one of the four cases was a real hassle.) Maybe I've been fortunate in that regard.

But yes, the OP really ought to do something more robust with the credit card numbers than store them in a data/ directory. If nothing else, it's *very* embarrassing for a business to have to announce to all of its customers that their credit card numbers have been stolen. For a small business, that can just totally ruin your public image.

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