Wherever you travel to most places now, you can get some form of Free Wi-Fi. Whether you find this at the local coffee stop, office, while you’re shopping and well basically anywhere you see Free Wi-Fi for the convenience of their clientele.
We all enjoy the convenience of knowing we can be in touch at our convenience. Having this convenience means you can be in touch as much or as little as you want. It’s nice to know we can move seamlessly and still be connected with the ones who are important to us, whether this is for personal or business.
With all this convenience, there is also certain items one should be concerned about when it comes to your connection and privacy. When you connect to the internet with Free Wi-Fi, the initial connection you made to jump on the internet can now filter all your traffic, anything you look-up can be potentially open for viewing. Look-up a website and that lookup has to go to the provider to find the website, each look-up potentially shows up in the providers logs.
While many providers do not look at the logs or even log at all, there is also the concern of how well the Free Wi-Fi connection is setup for security. Having an open connection means others in the area can intercept your connection and see what you are accessing, any site which is not (http(s)://) is also allowing your credentials to be shared publicly. At the same time another person can setup a Free Wi-Fi connection as a ‘honey pot’, attracting you to connect to their connection and logging all your information. It’s very hard to tell a legit Free Wi-Fi from a non-legit one, there is no pattern and the best way is prevention when you’re connected.
The Solution to protecting yourself on-line is to us a connection called a VPN, this provides you with a tunnel which hides all your traffic from other users and providers. VPN(Virtual Private Network) adds a layer of security to all your internet usage, whether you are surfing, emailing or socializing, all your internet is protected. You simply connect to your internet and then enable the VPN, now you are protected and keeping your information private.
Next time you are looking for that Free Wi-Fi, just connect with caution and always be on the lookout for sites that use secure (https://) when you are logging in. Banking sites and related use this type of encryption, any site that you need to log-in should provide you with this type of protection also.
An ounce of prevention goes a long way to keep you safe online.
