How to Protect Your Kids from Public Wi-Fi Dangers

Whether it’s at school or college, Wi-Fi is definitely an important part of your children’s daily life. You’d be hard pressed to find a child who rocked up to school without a phone, tablet or laptop in their backpack in our digital age.

The traditional blackboard and textbook lessons are gone. Instead our kids can research, discover, collaborate, create and most importantly, learn like never before. All while being connected to the Internet via their school or campus Wi-Fi.

Should you be concerned about that? Yes, given the way school Wi-Fi’s are “administered”. And this also applies to any public Wi-Fi hotspot. We’ll share more in the following sections below, as well as ways to protect your kids from public Wi-Fi dangers.

Public places, businesses, schools and campuses your children connect from offer free Wi-Fi to attract customers and to provide a public service. However, those who manage the public Wi-Fi are not IT or cybersecurity professionals, so, security is not the primary focus on these school or campus networks. These free Wi-Fi hotspots often do not have standard security practices such as:

• Securing the Wi-Fi access either by requiring a password to connect to the Wi-Fi hotspot or having some sort of login or registration before accessing the Internet
• Having up-to-date firmware on their routers and other networking equipment
• Having security compliant or at least hard to guess admin usernames and passwords
• Doing periodic routine checks to see if the networks have been compromised

Public Wi-Fi networks (including schools and campus hotspots) are attractive targets for hackers. They are usually easy to compromise and so many different people use them that they never run out of new targets.

Unfortunately, public Wi-Fi networks aren’t just convenient for your kids; they are also convenient for cyber criminals. They can snoop in on the traffic and get all the sensitive information you share with your family, like social media accounts, credit card numbers, email passwords, etc.

The real world solution to protect your children on public Wi-Fi is to use a VPN to encrypt your web traffic. This will make sure your kids will always be safe online, whether they are traveling to school or on vacation.

One of the issues of standard VPNs for school or campus Wi-Fi security is they slow down your web traffic. It’s bad enough those type of networks are already slow, but to get even slower? This can make the internet almost unusable.

You need a fast VPN that will not slow down your Internet. If you get a bonding VPN like Speedify, you can even get faster and more stable Internet.

Speedify is different among VPNs. It solves both security and speed concerns. By using channel bonding technology, Speedify can combine all available Internet connections simultaneously. 

Your kids will be protected from compromised Wi-Fi networks. Speedify also keeps your data safe from the prying eyes of hackers, ISPs, and even the hosts of the network.

Get the Speedify for Families VPN plan and use it on all major platforms: Windows, macOS, iOS, Android and Linux. At almost the cost of two individual monthly subscriptions, the Speedify for Families plan supports 5 users, each with up to 5 devices. You definitely get a better deal per user if you have kids.

Protecting the online privacy and activities of your family members protects all your shared resources and information. Plus, everybody benefits from fast and stable Internet for browsing, snapping, streaming or chatting. Which makes it a happy modern age family!