It’s that time of year when we’re all looking for deals online.

Black Friday promotions are everywhere and Christmas is fast approaching, so online shopping is often the most convenient way to make the most of the festive period. Online shopping, however,can present some serious privacy risks: Online scams are proliferating, and your personal data is more valuable to marketers and cybercriminals than ever.

Here’s how you can make the most of the sales without compromising on your safety and privacy.

Be wary of services offering discounts

Retail brands often offer discount codes for first-time shoppers, seasonal events, and multiple-purchase orders. Shopping around to find discount codes is a common practice and can sometimes result in saving money. But these services don’t necessarily have your savings in mind. They’re after something more valuable to them.

Honey, for example, is a browser extension owned by PayPal that claims to find and apply all available offers and discounts to your basket when you’re online shopping. The extension has been promoted heavily by affiliates, including Mr Beast, and claims to offer discounts for more than 30,000 stores.

An investigation from YouTuber MegaLag(nouvelle fenêtre), however, revealed that the extension was actually hiding discounts(nouvelle fenêtre) from shoppers and manipulating tracker cookies in the purchase process in order to capture affiliate money from influencers. Not only will you not save money when you use Honey to find discounts, the person or platform recommending the product you’re buying could also lose out on their referral fee.

There are even larger risks when it comes to voucher sites. Voucher sites(nouvelle fenêtre) may seem like a harmless way to get a good deal, but they can make it easy for cybercriminals to phish you for your personal information and bank details. By creating a spoofed site with a discount code you can use to make a purchase, it’s easy for criminals to harvest data in order to sell your data and potentially commit identity theft.

Essential tips when looking for discounts

  • Look for legitimate offers on the brand or seller’s verified social media account.
  • Sign up for the brand’s mailing list using an alias to get a first-time shopper discount code.
  • If you’re still using a voucher site, check the URL closely to make sure nothing is misspelled and that there’s a lock symbol (HTTPS) in your browser bar to prove that the website is secure.

Use aliases to hide your email address when shopping online

When you sign up for a shopping account with your email address, retailers can create an accurate profile of you and your online habits. That’s because your email address is tied to just about everything you do online, from online banking to accessing government services to socializing on forums to shopping online.

Your email address is equivalent to your passport in terms of your digital identity, and it can be used to scam you and even commit fraud.

An alias acts like a shield for your email address, hiding it from the website or service you’re signing up for while allowing you to receive emails to your personal inbox, such as shipping updates about your purchase. But the retailer won’t have your personal email address, so it can’t share or sell it to a third party — because email aliases are anonymous.

In order to safely shop online, we recommend using hide-my-email aliases when you create online accounts. Email aliases also help you evade spam and dynamic pricing(nouvelle fenêtre) — one of the more pernicious aspects of shopping online. Dynamic pricing is a method that businesses use to adjust the pricing of products based on demand and availability, and also by what you’re doing online and your browser history.

If a company can see that you’re comparing products across multiple sites, its dynamic pricing algorithm may increase the price to match up with its competitors. Prices can also vary at different times of day or in different locations, making it difficult to know the true price of an item. An email alias can help you evade dynamic pricing by hiding your email address from retailers, preventing them from creating a profile of you and tracking your behavior.

When each of your online accounts has its own unique email alias, you’ll be able to tell if a retailer has sold your information. For example, if you start receiving spam on your email account forwarded by youracme.shopping123@passmail.net alias, and that alias was only ever given to AcmeWebsite, you can confidently identify them (or their partners) as the source of the data leak. You can then delete that alias to stop the spam without putting your real email and associated information at risk.

Email aliases might sound complicated, but it’s easy to create one with the right tools. You don’t need any technical know-how, and you can manage and delete email aliases just as easily.

Essential tips for using aliases to shop privately

  • When creating a new online account, create a new alias specifically for that account.
  • If you start receiving spam via your specific email alias, simply delete it and create a new one.
  • You can use Proton Pass — our encrypted password manager — to create, manage, and delete aliases safely across all your devices.
  • Buy directly from sellers whenever you can, as third-party resellers are less reliable and more prone to scams.

Protect your personal data with a VPN

A v(nouvelle fenêtre)irtual (nouvelle fenêtre)p(nouvelle fenêtre)rivate (nouvelle fenêtre)n(nouvelle fenêtre)etwork (VPN)(nouvelle fenêtre) is one of your most useful tools when it comes to online shopping. It’s an easy-to-use tool that protects your privacy by encrypting your internet connection and limiting who can see your online activity and personal data.

Here’s what a VPN does:

  • Helps you access websites that may be geoblocked in your location by allowing you to connect to servers in different locations around the world.
  • Protects you if you’re browsing the internet on an insecure WiFi connection, such as in a coffee shop or at an airport. By encrypting your online activity, hackers can’t intercept sensitive information like your login credentials or credit card data while you shop.
  • Reduces price discrimination and tracking by masking your IP address(nouvelle fenêtre). This makes it harder for retailers, advertisers, and data brokers to profile you based on your browsing habits or location.

Hiding your IP address prevents eCommerce platforms from collecting and selling your data to third party data brokers. Data brokers collect personal information such as your name, email address, browsing habits, and even sensitive health data in order to sell it to marketers and sometimes criminals. By protecting your privacy with a VPN, you’re ensuring that you can use the internet and shop privately.

A VPN also helps you avoid dynamic pricing by hiding your browsing history, your location, and the device you’re browsing on. Without being able to see where else you’re shopping around, retail platforms aren’t able to adjust their prices to reflect your behavior.

Essential tips when using a VPN for online shopping

  • Connect to different VPN servers to prevent shopping sites from tracking you while browsing, and compare prices across multiple retailers.
  • Clear your cookies and internet history regularly to limit how much data retailers can store about your behavior.
  • Use Incognito or Private Browsing mode to reduce session-based tracking.
  • Log out of your accounts when casually browsing to avoid personalization based on past activity.
  • Be cautious when clicking on ads or pop-ups, as they may lead to phishing or unsafe sites. Proton VPN protects you from ads and malware on all VPN servers using an ad blocker(nouvelle fenêtre).