Ibm, Partner Trying To Make Internet Safe

Europe’s No. 1 credit card company and IBM announced an alliance Wednesday to try to make the Internet safe for electronic commerce.

Europay International SA, which is owned by European banks, said the system will allow users of the World Wide Web portion of the Internet to shop with a credit card that has a computer chip inside it.

“We think that it’s not very user-friendly to have people type in sensitive information like their card number into a keyboard,” said Richard Tischler, spokesman for Waterloo, Belgium-based Europay.

While marketing of goods has become common on the global computer network, there are few transactions because of the difficulty of making sure data is secure.