Your personal security and privacy is no doubt important, but more often than not we are not the most diligent individuals when it comes to protecting it. In most cases the privacy and security features are buried deep in social media sites and even on the smartphones that we use everyday.

You only need to turn to the auto-connect feature on all of our smartphones to realize how little we are protected. I’m saying this because nine times out of ten, most people haven’t turned this feature off nor were worried that they were connected to public networks.

Why is this such a worry?

Because public networks aren’t the most robust wifi networks around compared to your wifi at home. Public networks are prone to having spoof networks and are generally a hackers playground to extract data en mass.

Where auto-connect comes into this is that if you’re using a public network, auto-connect will automatically recognize a network and the password that you used to connect to it. For example, if you go to your local coffee shop and their network is called “freecoffee” the moment you log into that network, auto-connect will connect to that network every single time you’re around that area. It’s certainly convenient, however if a hacker creates their own network and names it “freecoffee” your phone will also recognize that network and connect to it. Even if you are not at your local coffee shop. At that point, you’re vulnerable to getting your phone hacked into and the hacker getting all kinds of information.

Auto-connect is simply a bad idea if all you’re connecting to is public wifi. Instead the auto-connect feature will help you if it’s connecting you to a wifi network that requires some level of authentication like a password.