It seems almost churlish to tell you that you need to be careful when you’re using the internet in a public place; after all, public hotspots are a service that has made our lives so much easier than they used to be. Instead of leaving home or the office and not being able to check our emails or keep up with what’s happening at work until we reach our destination, we can now stay in contact at all times. When you have a hundred important things to be thinking about, that’s a truly wonderful thing.
Sadly, we do have to tell you to be careful. There are always a few people out there who will take advantage of any situation for their own ends, and public hotspots are no different. Hackers, spammers, cyber criminals and online identity thieves have all realized that public Wi-Fi is a perfect place to go about their unpleasant business, and that’s bad news for the rest of us.
Why Do I Need To Think About Safety In Public Hotspots?
What makes public internet hotspots the perfect breeding ground for criminals is exactly the same thing that makes it so useful for everyone else. A public hotspot is not a secure network – it’s designed to allow anybody and everybody to access it. Once you’ve logged on to the network, you’re joining perhaps hundreds of other people using the same system, with no security barriers between you. That person on their laptop sat near you in the café may be a cyber thief waiting to look over your shoulder and use fairly simple techniques like data sniffers and activity loggers to see what you’re doing and steal your information.
Why Does My Safety In A Public Hotspot Depend On My VPN?
A VPN, or Virtual Private Network, is the secret to preventing this from happening. It’s designed to make you anonymous and totally secure all the time you surf the internet and it can do this even in a public hotspot. All the data you send back and forth across the internet will be encrypted and sent through a tunnel to a server, where you’re assigned a new IP address to protect your identity.
A hacker can still try to look over your shoulder. They can even grab hold of your data if they like. The difference between browsing unsecured and using a VPN, however, is that the data they will grab in the latter case will be encrypted to a level it would take millions of years to force into, so it will do the thief no good at all to be in possession of it.
If you would like to improve your safety while you use public hotspots, we recommend taking a look at the top five VPN providers that our experts selected for you:
| Rank | Provider Name | Starting Price | Money Back Guarantee | Visit Provider Site |
 | ExpressVPN | $6.67/month | 30 Days |  |
| 2 | Hidemyass | $11.52/month | 30 Days | |
| 3 | IPVanish | $10.00/month | 7 Days | |
| 4 | VyprVPN | $10.00/Month | 7 Days | |
| 5 | StrongVPN | $10.00/month | 7 Days | |
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