Browsing Habits Based on Wi-Fi Usage

Every now and then I'm out somewhere that offers public Wi-Fi. This is a great thing, and I'm always happy to see places that have it. It's really becoming more and more prevalent, showing up in many bars, most every coffee place, and tons of other locations. There is one problem, though, and that is how much can you trust it? When you are using the Wi-Fi provided there, you expose yourself to all sorts of dangers. Given their openness, someone with nefarious intentions could really pose a threat. With the right tools and know how, someone could monitor all of your traffic, and do with it as they please. This seems to be something that is becoming more common knowledge, but there are still a lot of users out there that just don't think about this. I'm not here to teach you Wi-Fi safety, though. If you want that, you can head to CNET for a basic lesson on protection at public Wi-Fi hotspots, or just look to our friend Google.

I'm here to see what you find your usage habits to be when you are on a network that is not your own. I was thinking about this when I was at WordCamp this weekend. Just like a good conference should, they provided open Wi-Fi for everyone to use, and I'm willing to bet everyone did. While there, people did everything from logging in to their email to logging in to their web servers. These are things that you want to keep secure, yet people are logging in on an open network that is being heavily used. The thought, of course, is that the group at a conference like that is hopefully not going to be interested in doing bad things, but you never know. I would be interested to know if they maintained the same browsing habits if they were at their local coffee shop. Would they feel more or less safe there? In addition to using their emails and such, did anyone do any shopping? Check their bank account?

Personally, I usually try to error on the side of caution. This weekend I was logging in to my server, email, and other things just like everyone else. When I'm out at a random place, I usually won't log in to certain things. If I'm on any network but my own, I never log in to any financial related site, nor do I do anything where I enter a credit card. There are some places that I won't log into anything from. Maybe I'm overly paranoid, maybe I'm pretty normal. I know there are people that don't seem to be as cautious, though, since I've seen people logging on their bank sites while at Starbucks. What about you. How does your internet usage change based on where you are?