Protecting privacy in the Internet is everybody’s responsibility. You should never put personal details of other people to the web and it is also a good idea to thoroughly consider what information you put there about yourself as well. Things you put to Internet might be difficult or even impossible to remove once posted. E.g. you should never put any private information as students’ names and addresses to your webpage: in the worst cases the information can end up in criminal hands through search engines and it can violate the privacy of the students and in the worst case even lead to an identity theft.
Some online applications need your personal information in order to work. In these cases, you have to consider if you trust the service provider and you have to be able to confirm that the provider is who you think it is. Also the data transfer has to be reliable. For instance, the OUAS website uses this address: https://www.oamk.fi/; the https at the beginning of the address indicates a secure connection; it means that the data is not delivered as plain text over the net. NB. Never give your (or anybody else’s) personal information to a web service that does not use a secure connection in transferring the data!
If you give your personal details to a web service, always read the privacy policy of the service and check the reliability of the company behind the service. From the privacy policy, you can see the purpose of the service and how they handle your personal information.