As
a customer of Valentine & Associates Inc., you don't
have to worry about the security of your personal information.
Just like you, we want all your personal information kept
that way - personal and private. When you give us information
about yourself over our Web site, we use it to verify who
you are, and to complete your business. Your personal information
is private and we respect your privacy. The information
you give us, stays with us. We have never sold and never
will sell information about you to any third party.
At Valentine & Associates Inc., your personal and account
information is secure and private - always. Thawte, a Verisign
company, is a recognized leader in Internet security. By
clicking on the Thawte seal to the left you can verify the
security of our Web site and be assured that the information
you submit via our Web site is protected. 40-bit encryption
scrambles your transmissions when crossing the Internet.
What is encryption? Encryption takes meaningful text and
numbers and scrambles them into numerical nonsense before
transmitting them across the Internet. Your personal information
becomes "all mixed up and nonsense" when encryption is in
place. For example, "pay $40 from your visa card" could
become something like "752144835628174317312". The encryption
process occurs for information going both directions - from
your computer to Valentine & Associates and vice versa.
Encryption uses complex algorithmic formulas to create a
key that is used to translate the nonsense back to "pay
$40 from your visa card". There are billions of potential
keys, and a different key is used for each session. Your
computer and Valentine & Associates's computer establish
this key when they make your internet connection. Because
there are billions of potential keys, it would take a thief
several lifetimes to come up with the exact key a specific
transmission uses. Netscape estimates the basic level of
encryption (40-bit or international) would take a 64-MIPS
computer a year of dedicated processor time to break. |
