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About Public Wi-Fi
The most overlooked and common risk that Indian people associate with using public Wi-Fi as said by Norton By Symantec is the fact that while using the public internet, most of the people are exposing their banking account transactions and numbers, personal photos, and videos and such other personal information.
There is no denying that consumers are not able to resist the favour of a free public-Wi-Fi even when it is utterly unimportant as stated by “Norton Wi-Fi Risk Report 2017” by Symantec. Thus, in doing so, people unconsciously reveal sensitive and confidential information that they are not supposed to.
Observing the critical condition of people’s behaviour online using public Wi-Fi, Ritesh Chopra, Country Manager, Consumer Business Unit, Symantec, states, “There is a deep divide between what people think is safe when it comes to using public Wi-Fi versus the reality.”
Considering the online criminals, he adds, “What someone thinks are private on their personal device can easily be accessed by cybercriminals through unsecured Wi-Fi Networks or even apps with privacy vulnerabilities.”
What does the report say?
The Norton report observes that a major percentage of 73 of the Indian people would exchange and share personal information over a good Wi-Fi connection such as watching an advertisement video (35%), accessing and editing social media profiles along with sharing personal photos and videos (19%), uploading personal photos and videos on drive (22%), managing and accessing confidential and personal emails (19%) and browsing online dating profiles (16%).
There was a survey arranged including more than 15,000 consumers from 15 different countries. It revealed that almost half of the Indian people access public Wi-Fi without the Wi-Fi owner’s permission. Also, the report revealed that 31% of Indian internet users have accessed suggestive or explicit contents over public Wi-Fi. Among them, 49% have claimed to do so while staying at hotels and the other 44% while at work.
Measures suggested
Virtual Private Network (VPN) and HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) are the security measures that have been included in the report to minimise the chances of people getting attacked by cyber criminals.