Entering your personal data on a website

If you are registering with an organisation or a company, or maybe even just joining a club, you are going to have to enter your personal details on a website. Now your personal data is something that is personal to you and is your property. And you need to be careful where you are adding it because you do not want to be added on to mailing lists you do not want to be part of, you do not want to be getting newsletters if you do not want them. But more importantly, you do not want to become a victim of any identity theft. So when you are entering your data onto a website, just make sure it is a genuine website before you start entering it. So here, what we are looking at doing is just entering on to a shopping store.

So this is Tesco's website, and on here is just to register an account with them. So what it says at the top here is if you already got an account, you can sign in. So if you ever accidentally get to this page once you have already registered, you can directly sign in there. But to start with here is asking for your email address. So you just put your email address in there and a password. Make sure the password meets their requirements. So by clicking in here, it is telling you exactly what the requirements are of the password. And this will be covered in separate videos, how to make a secure password, then... It has pretty much got the requirements here. You can also hit this button here that says "Show," which means as you type the password, everything appears in the box.

So if you are not sure what you are doing, you can put it there. And as you do that, you see the green ticks are appearing down here. This is just showing that you meet the requirements. So if I now put some numbers in, another tick. And it is also asking for capital letters, so if I hit the capital button, the final tick is there. So it is an easy way of just double-checking to see exactly what the password is and making sure that is secure. So here, it has got another section where it is asking you for some information for a club card, so you are going to join their program. So we would leave that in there. If you already got one, you can leave that because it is probably that you have already registered in the past. And also you do not want to join their club card scheme. So it is always giving you an option to join that and not join it.

Down here, you got your personal details. So you will just literally just select from here, your title, and then first name, last name, phone number and postcode. So the reason that they want these, your real names, and sometimes you will see an asterisk next to them as a required field. So have a look at that. So if you do not particularly want to put a title down, sometimes that's not a required field. But you will see from whichever the website is, whether you have to do that. Often when they are putting your address in, they want to make sure your address is a genuine address. So what they will do here is put a postcode in and it will come up from a list rather than you typing it manually in. So if we just put our postcode here, you can hit the find address.

And then from there, there are lots of different addresses and you can just literally pick off, the company wants... Our address here, which is ProTrainings. All the details are in there. Now the other option you have with that is to manually enter in the details if you want to, that was an option at the start, you can do that. As you go down, you can look at the marketing communications. So some of them will be things you have to do if you particularly want to open an account with this organisation, and others will be how they can then communicate with you. So we have... You are after... The whole point of this is to open up one with Tesco stores, so the tick is in the box and you can remove the ticks. But also if you want to know information about their banking and their mobile phones, you could put the information in there.

You will always be able to unsubscribe for anything later on. So by logging into the account, you can unsubscribe if you want to, or often the emails, when you do receive them, will have an unsubscribe link at the bottom and you can click on that and it will automatically remove it. So what you then do is hit the "Create Account," and then you will go through the process then of setting up an account with that organisation. Often when you do set up accounts with organisations, they will want to test that the email is the correct one. So sometimes what they will do is they will send you an email, and in that email, you either click a link or you have a number or a reference number in there, so you can cut and paste that and you can paste it into their website.

It just gives a validation process to make sure that the email you provided is correct. They will also sometimes ask you to type it twice. You cannot often paste it in those boxes, often they will make you physically type it so they can again confirm that the email is the correct one. Because there is not a lot of point in setting up an account with an organisation if they then cannot get hold of you. Occasionally, others will validate your mobile phone number if they are going to be giving you text alerts. So they might send you a text to your mobile phone and then there is a code in it and you just put that onto the website. These are all different sorts of authentication methods that companies or organisations may use if you want to register as a website with them.

So finally, remember this data is your personal data so make sure that you only enter what you are comfortable entering. Some websites will ask you for your date of birth, it might be required. A lot of the government type websites will ask for your date of birth because they are tying your date of birth in with your address and the details that you have given. But other organisations may well just ask for your date of birth because they want to send you a birthday card, or email at Christmas and Christmas cards, things like that. So it is up to you, so look at the fields that are required to be entered and the ones that do not have to be. And if you do not feel comfortable about giving information like your date of birth and it is not required, then do not give it. That helps improve your internet security.