Wi-Fi that is not yours
Use café, hotel and hospital Wi-Fi without anxiety — and know the one situation that genuinely calls for care.
You were probably told, some years ago, never to do anything important on public Wi-Fi. That advice was sound at the time. It is now largely out of date, and the fear it left behind is doing more harm than the risk it described.
It came from an era when web pages traveled unscrambled, so anybody sharing a café network could read them. Nearly every site now scrambles the conversation between you and it — that is what the padlock is for. The person at the next table sees that you are talking to your bank, and not one word of what you said.
Key points
- Modern sites scramble your conversation, so reading on public Wi-Fi is not the risk it was
- The real risk is joining a network run by somebody pretending to be the café or hotel
- Ask which network is theirs, and forget it again when you leave
- Never install anything a network asks you to install to get online
What to remember
- Which network you joined, and what you typed into it. Those are the only two questions modern public Wi-Fi asks of you.
- Which network, not what you were doing on it. That is the whole of modern public Wi-Fi advice.
- Reading is fine. Typing passwords into whatever the network hands you, and installing things it asks for, is where the care goes.
- When you are out and about with your phone or laptop, which sounds most like you?
Try this
Look through the saved Wi-Fi networks on your phone — in Settings, under Wi-Fi. You will find hotels and cafés from years ago. Forget the ones you will never return to; it takes a minute and closes a door you did not know was open.
Practice: Wi-Fi that is not yours. Your first lesson is free, with no account or card; the rest are part of a Lantern plan. Interactive lessons require JavaScript.