Dom Lacey, our CTO, has today confirmed that Justgiving and Firstgiving are now certified fully compliant with the Data Security Standards set by the Payment Card Industry, three weeks ahead of the June 30th deadline.

According to the BBC News website, these new standards have been set up in "an attempt to raise the baseline security practices of online merchants" and "all web shops that process more than 20,000 transactions per year will have to comply with the PCI standards".

Another explanation of the new standards can be found on Wikipedia.

Whilst the security of our site has always been extremely important to us (see previous improvements here),
we can now provide VISA-certified assurances to any enquiries about the
the security of our users’ credit card and personal data.

Our new certificate is online here, or you can download it: Download pci_dss_compliance_certificate_giving_2007.pdf

This has been a massive project undertaken by our tech team and we’re
really proud that they have managed to prove our compliance before 85%
of the online payments and e-commerce industry.

More information about security on Justgiving can be found in our privacy policy and security policy, or by checking our Verisign certificate.

(re-posted from the Justgiving blog, with slight variation brought to you by Thos)