Many people don’t understand this, but even a “secure” wireless network is pretty much an open book to anyone who’s ON that network. Your network traffic, unless encrypted, is clearly visible to anyone on that network who takes even the most basic steps towards reading it. There’s even a Firefox extension that makes doing this utterly trivial.

What does this mean? It means that, if you’re bloody minded, you can sit in a Starbuck’s and monitor people’s Facebook and Amazon activity in order to spoof it later. By the same token, it means that anything you touch on wifi that doesn’t have an HTTPS in front of it is an open book that anyone around you can see and review if they want. Banks, for the most part, understand this; they mostly use the encrypted connections. But Facebook’s https://www.facebook.com just redirects to the unencrypted version by default. Security? What’s that?

If you’re nerdy, or know someone who is, you can easily set up ways to avoid getting compromised by this by using something like a VPN, or even Tor. But if you’re not, the absolute least you can do is avoid using insecure sites in public places. This goes for phones and tablets on wifi, too, by the way (you can probably assume your 3G connections are more secure, however).

Seriously. Don’t do it. Be careful. This goes for coffeeshops, airports, hotels, etc. Identify theft gets mighty easy if people can read all your network traffic, don’t you think?