Watchdog probes online shopping
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The Office of Fair Trading is to study how online shoppers can be more confident and better protected.
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Bargain hunters tracking down  sought-after toys and electronics flocked to the Web ahead of  "Cyber Monday," the unofficial start of the online holiday  shopping season, three Internet sites said on Saturday.
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Shopping around shopping guides shows a new level of sophistication to buying online, a report suggests.
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Caveats to keep in mind while holiday shopping online.
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New safeguards on credit and debit card payments in shops has led fraudsters to focus on internet and phone payments, an anti-fraud agency says.
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Sears Holdings has come under fire from privacy advocates for making the purchase history of its customers publicly available on its Managemyhome.com Web site.Manage My Home is a community portal where Sears shoppers can download product manuals, find product tips, and get home renovation ideas.The Web site has a feature called &quot;Find your products&quot; that lets users look up past purchases. Ostensibly, this is designed to help customers keep track of items they&#39;ve bought from the retailer, but the site also lets them look up the purchase histories of other people.&quot;Sears offers no security whatsoever to prevent a Manage My Home user from retrieving another person&#39;s purchase history by entering that person&#39;s name, phone number, and address,&quot; wrote Ben Edelman, an assistant professor with Harvard Business School, in a blog posting.This is a violation of Sears&#39; own online privacy policy, which does not allow the company to share users&#39; purchase history with the general public, Edelman said.The information could be misused by scammers, said Benjamin Googins, a CA senior engineer who has also written about the issue. &quot;A potential burglar or scam artist could quite easily sit at home with a phone book, checking to see what people in a given neighborhood had purchased,&quot; he wrote.Googins said that he was able to track purchases as far back as 1978 on the site.One Sears customer said he was upset by the disclosure.&quot;It&#39;s pretty amazing that in 2008 a major corporation such as Sears Roebuck can show such blatant disregard for the privacy of its customers. It definitely will make me think twice before ordering from them again,&quot; said Doug Fuller, an Oakland, Calif., realtor. &quot;It&#39;s not like it is some rinky-dink company. This is a major corporation. And with all the identity theft going on, this is the best they can do?&quot; he said via instant message.A Sears spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment. Sears Holdings, the owner of the Sears Roebuck and Kmart department stores, is the third-largest retailer in the United States.This is the second time Sears has come under fire for privacy concerns in recent weeks. In December and early January, Googins and Edelman blasted Sears for&#160;downloading invasive comScore Web tracking software&#160;to some users of its MySHCcommunity.com Web site without adequate disclosure.Sears has defended its use of the tracking software, pointing out that users are notified of the software&#39;s features before they download it.
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Government agents may soon find valuable information through an online-recommendation system like the one on Amazon.com: Spies who read this report, it might say, also found these reports useful.
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Travel: Gear up for a Christmas spending spree with a spot of online window shopping.
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Business & money: Operation at Currys and PC World-owner part of inquiry into allegations of anti-competitive practices
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By John McBride, The Charlotte Observer, N.C.  Sep. 10--You go to Google and get your search results -- then what?   How do you know whether the sites Google returns can be trusted? You can't. It's you against the world.
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A service launched last week that aims to help online users determine whether their credit card and Social Security numbers may have been compromised is running into skepticism about how secure -- and safe -- it is.
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How forthcoming are search engines in disclosing their paid placement and paid inclusion policies?  They're better than they were a couple of years ago, but there's still room for improvement, according to a prominent watchdog group.
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By Mark Albright, St. Petersburg Times, Fla.  Jun. 2--Most shoppers today read up on products and check prices on the  Internet before buying. Now mall stores have a new tool to get in shoppers'  faces online before they make up their mind.
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The FTC plans to look into Microsoft and Yahoo's recent buys of Web advertising companies in a comprehensive review to check for possible antitrust concerns, the Wall Street Journal reported.
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By RUKI SAYID  ONLINE shoppers have access to 26,000 websites - but most only buy from 10, research has revealed.   Consumers who trawl the high street visit a wider variety of stores than 75 per cent of cybershoppers.
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Ask Eileen Harrington, associate director of the FTC's consumer protection bureau, questions about spam and consumer fraud on the Internet.
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Consumers are becoming skittish about the potential dangers of e-commerce, survey says.