No phone and don't tend to wander around with a laptop.
That said yeah I will. I can reasonably see what goes for wifi. I will however avoid sending sensitive data up to and including browsing in porn mode for the duration (not to mention any wandering about technology is not my daily driver in general). Anything sensitive is SSL or not at all and if you can bypass my general security setup there then you deserve to get what I have (which is not a lot).
Most of the time it is just to look up a quick fact, tell someone about an item or similar so I don't really care that some hacker out there can tell that I (in this case some anonymous internet guy) could not remember the name of a James Bond love interest, wanted to show a friend about a cool tech toy to get when they got home, or the name of a restaurant somewhere nearby.
Most of the VPN adverts you see on all your favourite internet video makers (
https://sponsor.ajay.app/ helps dodge those and well worth knowing about in addition to baseline ad blocking software) are more for specific scenarios that are no longer that relevant (the thing that allowed the likes of firesheep to work have not applied since security protocols most devices no longer accept or will warn you about), unlikely to trouble you if you have even a modicum of tech sense and spend 5 minutes reading up on things, and 99% of the time anything truly sensitive will likely be going over SSL which is harder to do anything useful with. A VPN will help dodge many of those issues but most of the time the reasons to have one are to dodge letters because you are torrenting, because you want to access region locked content (be it because your country, company or the site hosting it plays accordingly) or you don't want the site you are visiting to know your IP address for whatever reason.
!00 percent safe ? You said you "think" in the sentence so you are still unsure. And "think" is not 100 percent.
No, they are not 100 parent safe. Bank said that they never say its 100 percent safe. It could be hackable anyway because its technology hackable anyway. Sorry about my English.
Approximately 100% as in if the card gets stolen then it would have been
a) From a bad site, that would have happened anyway even if I was sitting in a Mission Impossible style computer setup, down 7 proxies and 6 VPNs, and TOR.
b) Because some light fingered shop assistant or fellow shopper hovered a camera phone over the thing when I got it out and got all the numbers to tap in later (sorry sir the computer says I need to check your ID/do you wish to sign up to our junk mail scheme getting the address).
c) Someone I know lifting my wallet or maybe being pickpocketed.
d) From malware on my computer. Public wifi or not is unlikely to cause this for me.
The chances of some random public wifi either rooting my phone, man in the middle on my bank, hacking the app or breaking SSL traffic is miniscule.
Even with all that then while it is annoying if it is a credit card that got pinged then you just phone up, say wasn't me, they say OK thanks for telling us we will sort that, and you going about your life.
I generally pay cash for everything, usually get paid in cash and while my bank did send me a new fangled card with a wave the thing over the reader to pay there was an unfortunate accident later that night* so I no longer have that option.
*it was horrible. The card was just sitting there on my anvil like it does. I was wandering around with a hammer and hole punch in my hand. Tripped and it all just happened, hole right through the card. Fortunately it was nowhere near the magnetic strip, chip for chip and pin, or various numbers and only took out the wire for the mag coil that ran around the outside to make the wave it over to pay.
