Originally Posted by
der_saeufer
Probably not.
Even if you're doing online banking on airport wifi, the more likely ways you're going to get hacked are:
- the dude watching over your shoulder as you type your password
- someone hacking your bank or a merchant with whom you've done business
- someone hacking another website that stored passwords in cleartext and using the password elsewhere (but you'd never use the same password on that dodgy forum for owners of 1984 Pontiac Fieros as you use for your bank... right?)
TLS (the encryption behind https, etc.) is quite secure and essentially every legitimate organization uses it these days. The alleged dangers of public wifi are, IMO, grossly overstated in 2019.
This is probably true, but aside from the obvious benefit of location swapping to use Geo-locked things, a VPN is kinda like a condom. Sure, the chances of you getting an STD from connecting to that random free public hotspot in $RANDOM_CAFE is pretty slim, but why take the chance? I do not connect to public WiFi anywhere without a VPN active. With the VPN, sure there's also an amount of blind trust, BUT I can at least research the VPN to determine the level of risk involved and make a generally informed opinion on whether or not to trust them, where I cannot really easily verify that "Maid Cafe Public WiFi" and "Maid Cafe Public WiFi 2" are legitimate APs. It's just risk mitigation IMO and running a TLS encrypted connection across an also encrypted VPN session moves that risk from Killed By An Out Of Control Bus to Killed By Falling Space Station Debris territory.
Note, for #1 above, I, personally, don't type critical things where people can easily see them without being noticed, and my laptop always has a security screen on it which minimizes the "over the shoulder" viewers. But unlike the average person, I lean very far to the paranoid side of situational awareness.
For 2, there's NOTHING you can do to mitigate that, so it's not a concern at all.
For 3, that's why I use LastPass and a purely random password for every single account I have.