Unpopular opinion: Public WiFi in coffee shops is safer than I thought

I always told people to never use the WiFi at places like Starbucks. Then I visited the roastery in Portland last week and noticed they use a captive portal that forces HTTPS on everything. The barista even told me they run their network through a Cloudflare filter. I still use a VPN for banking, but I feel way less worried about checking email there now. Has anyone else run across a cafe that actually takes this stuff seriously?

2 comments

2 Comments

kimr101d ago

Whoa, this is actually part of a bigger trend I've noticed everywhere lately. It's like companies are finally realizing they can't just throw up a free network and call it done. More places like hotels, airports, and even some libraries are moving to forced HTTPS and basic filtering. It's not perfect, but it's a huge step up from how it was five years ago where you'd connect and literally anything could sniff your traffic. People used to act like using public WiFi was the same as handing your password to a stranger. Now the baseline security is higher just because the tech got cheaper and easier to implement.

riley_schmidt1d ago

Kinda funny you mention that because my local coffee shop's "security upgrade" was just them taping a QR code to the counter that leads to a pdf about phishing scams. Real confidence booster when I'm logging into my bank account next to someone watching TikTok on the same network. The barista definitely could not tell me a single thing about Cloudflare or HTTPS, just shrugged and said "it should work." At least your place had someone who actually knew what a filter was, mine still uses the default password that's printed on the receipt.