What is the danger of using public WiFi and how great is that danger?

1 Answer

Answer :

answer:Yes, it is somewhat dangerous in the sense that you don’t know if the person/company that is hosting the public wifi is ‘capturing’ your data flow and is stealing your data. There are two issues: 1) for banking and financial transactions, they could catch your password and login, and then use them. Fortunately, this problem is much less prevalent today, because most reputable banking sites use HTTPS (the S meaning Secure) encoding, which encrypts your data on the PC, and decrypts it on their server. This isn’t 100% perfect; HTTPS has some vulnerabilities – but it’s pretty damned secure. 2) Confidentiality: Suppose you are on a web site looking up terms like “divorce” and “rat poison”. Those don’t have a financial effect, but do you really want the server operator (and potentially the NSA) to know what you’re searching? (Again, Google uses HTTPS, so that’s a positive, but not all web sites do.) To be super secure, use a VPN. But that’s a couple $$ a month and may be overkill. Bottom line, there is still some degree of risk on using public Wifi, but much less than before if you are using relatively modern browsers.

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