Internet Shopping

And by internet shopping I mean places like www.kijiji.com and www.craigslist.com

What do you guys think?

We found my mutt on Kijiji, and he's been fantastic so far, but the guy that brought him wasn't. Of course, that doesn't have anything to do with the website, but our own poor judgement and the guys weird personality.

My darling niece's mother often buys/sells baby things on Kijiji, and she's had an okay time so far. Although she's had a few run in's with scammers, she still goes back thanks to the ease of access.

I personally find Craigslist to be a giant waste of my time. The website is poorly put together in my opinion and hard to read, as well as navigate.

My question though, is what do you guys think? Taking a step back and looking at the websites, I'm a bit shocked that I ever went on them in the first place.

Now, let's think about this slowly. For this point I'm trying to make, we can toss in www.ebay.com and www.etsy.com (of course, I love etsy like nobodies business, but for the sake of being fair, I'll put it in there.)

For ebay and etsy you give people your address so they can mail you things. I've never had any bad experiences with either, nor has anyone I know, but think about it. You're giving people your address on the internet.

We were always taught to not talk to strangers, never give out personal information, and here we all are; sitting in front of the computers, sending our addresses out to people we've never talked to, let alone met. These aren't friends we've met online, and have known for years. These are complete and total strangers, who we're trusting with our addresses. I suppose for those two websites, it's not so bad. Most of us don't have picture of ourselves posted up, or our ages. Keeping the creepers away seems fairly easy.

Now let's talk about Kijiji and Craigslist, as well as any website out there even remotely like them.

When we bought our mutt, we text a man our address and phone number, so he could plug it into his GPS. Just because he had puppies doesn't mean he was a cool guy. This man proceeded to drive to our house, meet myself, Mom and my sister. He stayed around and chatted. He was an idiot, but not a creep, and that's fine. But what if he had been a creep?

He knew our address, who lived at the house, that it was a houseful of young women, and their mother. And that we had a dog. He knew where our front door was, where our side door was, and he knew we had a field behind our house.

Niece's mommy tends to get her Hub to drive her to pick up things, which is okay. There's two people, they're going and getting the stuff, great. But what about mothers who don't drive, or single fathers even? Someone's selling baby products online, you get them to deliver it to you. These strange people end up knowing where you live, how old your baby is, and basically they know your schedule, or at least when you're going to be home on that one day of the week.

I guess you could call me paranoid, but really. We've grown really lax in our safety precautions. Everyone is paranoid to give out their credit card numbers, but we're all tossing our addresses out willy-nilly. I'd rather have a bunch of garbage and false charges on my credit card, than give a creeper online my address. I think I'll be doing pick ups from now on, and never alone.

Just some thoughts.