Public Wifi - The Dangers

TASK: Try to reduce your reliance on Public Wi-Fi. Think: Why is Starbucks/Hotel X/Airport/Train giving me FREE Wi-Fi? There is no such thing as free. They make money out of collecting and selling your data. Convenience wins over for many people, so they use the free service. Often it is a necessity and helps keep your business online or in contact with friends and family. So we will all use it. Just be aware of this and protect yourself with a VPN at least.

Most are not aware that the "Free" Wi-Fi provider will track this sort of information:

• Physical location.

• Your device hardware ID which is most often linked to your actual identity.

• Time, date and duration of usage.

• The websites you visit.

• Potentially passwords and usernames depending on security levels, this can happen although they mostly protected, but not a place to be doing your banking for example.

• Information about which email provider you use.

WHY: Reducing your reliance on Public Wi-Fi reduces the chance of attack and the amount of information you are giving away. It is that simple. At a public Wi-Fi attackers can potentially spoof the public Wi-Fi radio signals, pretending to be say "Starbucks Wi-Fi". This is fairly easy to do. This way you get a man in the middle attack.

A strong suggestion would be to use a VPN in all cases when on public Wi-Fi. This at least helps bypass the Free Wi-Fi provider in terms of what information they get. You then have to trust your VPN provider instead of course. Choose wisely. See the resources page for more info or try the links below:

Recommended Virtual Private Networks (VPN)

1. Mullvad

2. ProtonVPN

3. IVPN