There's a lot of news these days about fraud, identity theft, viruses and spyware, and all kinds of other online vulnerabilities. They are especially a concern for those of us that make purchases with a credit card.
As a result it makes sense to protect yourself when buying online. It doesn't seem to be common knowledge yet, but there are a few credit card companies that allow you to create a single use credit card, complete with a unique credit card number, expiration date, and that little verification code.
Aside... That little printed code used to be a good security feature, but now that everyone seems to use it, there are only a handful of cases where it seems to protect us. One of those cases is the famous restaurant and store scam where they scan your card twice, or scan it into a modified machine that keeps your card info for later download by the thieves. And lest you think it never happens, I've been to a famous chain restaurant where that's been done. Fortunately, it was during a different time frame.
Of course you don't really get a new credit card, you just get the unique purchase information. You can choose a credit limit for the number and an expiration date for the number. I'm going by memory now, but I think Bank One, Citibank, and MNBC (or MBNC?) are the ones in the US that were listed in a newspaper article last year. And if I remember the tv ads from many years ago, American Express was actually the first to do this because they had extra numbers in their series that they could use. They claimed other credit cards couldn't duplicate it because of a lack of numbers, but obviously that's been solved, probably by adding new sets of 4 digit codes to start off the credit card numbers with. I'm not sure if AMEX even still offers such a feature on any of their cards.
And if you're really trying to prevent identity theft, don't stop there. Make sure you shred or burn your sensitive trash also. Despite the fear of online buying by some, it seems that most identity theft cases are the old fasioned type which come from non-technological means like going through your trash. In some strange way that's good news... because if you are a mobile computing fanatic, you probably have come to depend on online purchases quite heavily.
So go get that new credit card (or figure out how to use that single purchase system) and buy something from your favorite Palm or Software vendor. Just make sure you leave a few $s for Laurens new commercial software application!
