this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
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Privacy
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Yes you're good. The ads are basically lying, or at least vastly overblowing the importance of VPN. It's nice to have in some situations, but no, hackers won't immediately pwn you as soon as you connect to a McDonald's wifi.
It was just a few years ago, before everything on the Internet was HTTPS, that using a public Wi-Fi was pretty dangerous, in terms of exposing your login credentials and traffic.
Even today, it's possible that some random sites might be HTTP only, but it's unlikely.
But even then, anyone on the same network can still see what sites you are going to, just not what's being said.
Most (all?) Http sites now give an angry "WARNING" message, and you need to hop through menus to access them.
So most people should be safe probably
I think that it is actually your browser warning you, so you should see it on every http site.
It's been more than a decade since that was the case.
This is not completely true. Try to look at email from shops (for campaigns etc.), and you will see tons of click-tracking links that go through HTTP. Any of that gets hijacked, and you have an avenue to be phished. DNS integrity is key, and a VPN being a layer 3 control (i.e., at the network level, not the application level) helps preventing some of these attack vectors.
If you do some sort if captive portal login even with VPN, you could still get pwned.