Public Wi-Fi Is Not Your Friend — What You Should Never Do on It
That free Wi-Fi at the coffee shop, airport, or hotel is convenient — and anyone can set up a hotspot with a familiar name ("Starbucks_WiFi_Free") that is impossible to tell from the real one without asking. Almost all traffic is encrypted now, so the realistic risk is not someone reading your data out of the air, but a hostile network steering you to a fake login page, a fake sign-in portal or a fake update prompt.
For banking, email or anything with sensitive credentials, prefer your mobile data. If you must use public Wi-Fi, never type a password into a page the network opened for you — open a new tab and type the address yourself. HTTPS is the minimum, not a check of the site: a fake page can have a valid certificate too, so read the domain — see what the HTTPS padlock means. A VPN moves your trust from the café to the VPN provider, which helps only if you chose the provider carefully: how to choose a VPN. And stop your phone joining such networks by itself: turn off auto-join for public Wi-Fi.
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