The relative safety of public wifi networks

Many people wonder whether using public wifi networks is a good idea. I'm talking about many types of networks, one of them being cafes that are open to the public.

If you know if your web site uses https, then good. See if you can figure it out, because it is one step that increases your safety. With gmail, there is an option to insist on https, so that if your connection finds that only http (without the 's') is available, it will refuse to work for you. This is a good thing.

In addition to using https, you may want to avoid wireless networks that use WEP instead of WPA. Knowing which form varies a lot by operating system, so I won't offer help with that.

If you can, send your password before you connect to the unknown network and let the website save the password. Do not let the browser save the password, because it might send the password when you don't know it. If you don't know the difference between the browser and the web site saving, you are not tall enough to go on this ride. Saving the password on the web site creates a cookie which might be valid for a few hours or days.

If you use google's optional two-step authentication, you will be asked your regular password and your one-time while you're in the coffee shop, but if someone sniffs them, they are useless, because your one-time password expires in less than a minute.

Different web sites have different levels of quality of security. It's impossible to rate all of them, but in general, it's safer to trust the big ones if there haven't been any breach stories about them lately. For example, I would trust gmail today but not linkedin, since linkedin had an inexcusable breach a few months ago. Linkedin may have cleaned up their act, but time will tell. If gmail has a breach, I would begin to distrust them, but so far, what I know about their security is that it is very good.

There is no absolute danger, and there is no absolute safety. Make a conscious choice about what's important. If using a cafe with wifi has some utility value, then use it, but don't use it for unnecessary things such as facebook. Facebook is essential for some people, and I'm not singling them out as useless or unsafe. It's an example of something I don't need when I'm out and about. It's a luxury to me. Decide what's necessary, what's useful, and what's a luxury. By limiting the number of things you do, you reduce your risk.