Coffee shop Wi-Fi and airport networks are convenient—but are they safe? In this episode, Deanne Rosso and Clarke Holt explain the real risks of public Wi-Fi and what to avoid doing on open networks.

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Is public Wi-Fi safe, or should you avoid it? Find out today on Elevate Wealth. Hey, everybody, I'm Deanne Rosso with Elevate Wealth Advisory. Happy to be back and joined again by Clarke Holt. Hey Clarke. Hey, how are you? I'm good. How are you doing? Great. So, people may be wondering why are financial advisers here talking about what might be an IT issue, right? But it's because people often check like bank account balances, investment account balances, and online account personal information, in public places like coffee shops, airports, hotels, things like that. So, Clarke, what is the real risk with public Wi-Fi? So, the risk is that someone in that area of public Wi-Fi could intercept activity on your laptop or your tablet. And so that's what we're trying to avoid is having that something somebody that might be nefarious....if you're doing something that's sensitive or some sort of financial activity, that could get intercepted, and that's what we want to try to avoid. And when you say intercepted, you mean they're taking things like your login, your password, the things that are needed to access your identity. Right. Wow. That's so scary. So what's the safest rule of thumb, then, to avoid that situation? So, what we tell people is that, you know, don't do any type of banking or financial transactions in public Wi-Fi areas. Again, you nailed it....coffee shops, airports are the two biggies. I mean, lobbies of hotels. If you have to do something on your laptop that might be sensitive, use a VPN, a Virtual Private Network. Okay. There's lots of great ones you can subscribe to. Or just use your cellular data. That may be a better way, but just use common sense. Keep it very generic if you're kind of doing web browsing, but no financial transactions or activity. Yeah. So, I mean, obviously cyber security and identity theft is a real risk these days. We see more and more hacks of our personal information, of our accounts and things like that. So, like Clarke says, protect yourself. You know, use a VPN if you're going to...that Virtual Private Network...or your cell data if you're going to access Wi-Fi in public areas. Or just try not to do those types of things in a public place. I mean, that's the simplest way to avoid someone intercepting you. Just have a cup of coffee, and do your work at home. Have a cup of coffee and talk with a friend. Exactly. Well, thank you, Clarke, for joining me today. And if you'd like more tips and tricks about how to protect yourself online, protect your financial information from security online security fraud, we are here to help. You can visit us at elevate-wealth.com and click "Let's talk." Thank you for watching. We'll see you next time.