hat require personal information to provide a service or product. Ideally any website that requires a username and password should provide a secure connection to exchange those credentials, but many sites that require registration allow the username and password to travel in the clear. Unfortunately, this is also true of some Webmail services. In this case your email is also traveling in the clear for snoops to trap and read.

While free WiFi is safe for secure websites, highly sensitive activities should only be performed from your own computer. A public computer should not be trusted for anything but casual surfing. Computers store passwords, usernames and other revealing data in a type of memory called cache making it possible to retrieve later by others. A public computer could also be infected with keylogger software that records keystrokes, defeating the purpose of point-to-point encryption by trapping account numbers, usernames and passwords as they are typed into the keyboard.