Public Wi-Fi in 2026: what is still actually risky

The public Wi-Fi advice most people carry around is from about 2012, when a large share of the web was unencrypted and a browser extension could hijack a logged-in session from the next table. That era ended.

The overwhelming majority of web traffic is now HTTPS, browsers warn loudly about anything that is not, and HSTS means many sites cannot be downgraded at all. The classic attack no longer works on a modern browser against a modern site.

That does not make an open network private. It moves what is exposed.

What the network operator still sees

Every domain you resolve. Unless your DNS is encrypted or tunnelled, the operator sees each lookup, with a timestamp.

Every hostname you connect to. The Server Name Indication field in a TLS handshake is sent in the clear unless Encrypted Client Hello is in use, which is still uneven.

Traffic volumes and timing, which describe activity even when contents are opaque.

Together the first two are a complete list of the sites you visited. Not the content — the list. For most people that list is the thing worth protecting, and it is exactly what a tunnel removes.

What is still genuinely risky

Captive portals. The sign-in flow is unencrypted by necessity, and a malicious portal can present anything. Never enter credentials into one that asks for an email password or a social login.

Non-browser software. Browsers are careful about certificates. Some applications, embedded devices and older software are not, and an app that fails to validate a certificate properly is vulnerable to interception in a way a browser is not.

Devices on the same network. An open network usually puts every guest on one flat segment. A laptop with file sharing enabled is visible to everyone in the building.

Old and unpatched devices. The attacks that stopped working against current software still work against software that has not been updated in years.

What a VPN actually fixes here

It fixes the first category completely. Inside a tunnel the operator sees one encrypted stream to one address: no DNS, no SNI, no destination list.

It does not fix a malicious captive portal, because the portal comes before the tunnel. It does not fix an application that ignores certificate errors. And it does not protect against other devices on the network if the kill switch permits local traffic, which most do by default so that printing keeps working.

So it is the right tool for the main remaining exposure and not a general shield.

A sensible routine

1. Join the network and complete the portal first, with the VPN off, since the portal blocks everything until you do.
2. Bring the tunnel up before doing anything else.
3. Confirm it is carrying traffic, because networks that interfere with portals sometimes interfere with tunnels.
4. Turn off file and printer sharing before you travel, once, permanently.
5. Keep devices updated, which does more than any of the above.

On a phone, on-demand rules make this automatic — the tunnel comes up when you join an unknown network without you thinking about it. That is the setting worth finding on iOS and its equivalent elsewhere.

The proportionate summary

Public Wi-Fi in 2026 is much safer than its reputation and not private at all. Nobody is reading your bank session. The café, and whoever runs its network, knows every site you opened.

If the second sentence bothers you, that is precisely the problem a VPN solves — and confirming it works, with the DNS leak test, takes less time than ordering the coffee.

What changed, in numbers

Google's transparency reporting has tracked the share of browsing over HTTPS for years, and across major platforms it now sits in the mid-nineties percent. A decade ago it was under half.

That single shift is responsible for most of the difference between the old advice and the current situation. It was not a security product that fixed coffee-shop Wi-Fi; it was the web moving to encryption by default, driven by free certificate authorities and by browsers making unencrypted pages progressively more unpleasant to serve.

Encrypted Client Hello, the remaining piece

The hostname in a TLS handshake is currently the largest routine leak on any network, because it is sent before encryption is established. Encrypted Client Hello closes it by encrypting that field too.

Support is growing and is far from universal, and it depends on both the browser and the site's infrastructure. Until it is ubiquitous, the destination list remains visible to any network you use, which is the specific gap a tunnel fills.

Hotel networks deserve their own paragraph

They combine everything: a captive portal, a flat network shared with hundreds of strangers, aggressive DNS interception, frequent UDP blocking, and session timeouts that drop you back to the portal mid-evening.

Nothing about that is unusually malicious. It is a network built cheaply for a transient population, and it is the environment where the routine above is most worth following exactly.