David McManus says the world is now waking up to payments online

A great deal of emphasis is put on the need to create strong passwords when signing up for online services, particularly anything which will hold secure, personal or financial information.

Over the years I have lost count of the number of people who use remarkably simple passwords for such things because anything more is ‘too difficult to remember’. It would be hard to feel much sympathy for someone with that attitude who then goes on to have their account hacked.

Your password could be as long and cryptic as you can possibly make it, but that is only denying the would-be thief access to your personal locker, little comfort if they instead manage to get hold of the master key.

Headline-grabbing stories of massive security breaches crop up regularly and it is easy to feel sorry for anyone who faces the nightmare – or at the very least, hassle – of having their financial information stolen.

However, last week saw the theft of data from a website that would probably struggle to garner such sympathy for its users.

Ashley Madison is a Canadian-based dating website with a difference; it exists primarily to help facilitate extramarital affairs. The site, which boasts over 35 million users across the world, had its database stolen by a hacking group calling itself Impact Team who seem to have targeted the company based on what it says are false claims.

One way that Ashley Madison makes money is to charge its member $20 to become ex-members. Yes, if you engage with the site, reveal personal and intimate details about yourself in seeking out an affair and then have second thoughts, you need to pay to have those details fully removed.

Impact Team say this claim of removal is not true and that your information is kept even after you leave.

Since the hacking of its data, Ashley Madison is offering a full delete of all data free which is wonderfully generous of them and a case of shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted and galloped around the world several times.

PayPal, a more reputable company which has so far managed to avoid a breach of its data, has just spun off from parent company eBay to once again stand on its own.

The payment site was purchased by eBay soon after launch in 2002. It has always been possible to make PayPal transactions without ever using eBay, but essentially the service has remained the same since its inception as a global, secure middle-man for online payments. The world is now waking up to online payments in the real world.

Apple Pay launched in the UK last week allowing us to use our mobile phones to register purchases at physical tills. Other companies, particularly Google, will soon follow suit and now that eBay is free to make its own choices about where it wishes to branch out, it seems an obvious area in which to go, particularly given its huge brand awareness.

For these large companies, security of data is by far their greatest priority. As long as they keep our information safe, they stand a chance that we will trust them. One slip-up and that trust will vanish forever.