On Mon, Mar 20, 2017 at 12:29 PM, Victor Odhner <vodhner@cox.net> wrote:

I’m really annoyed that so many companies offer open WIFI when it would be
so easy to secure those hot spots.  Restaurants, hotels, and the waiting
rooms of auto dealerships are almost 100% open.

[snip]
On 2017-03-20 13:20, Stephen Partington wrote:

This is usually done as a means to be easy for their customers.

Pretty much this.  Convenience is more valuable than security in most people's minds.

they’d be happy to do the right thing if we could explain it to the right people.

I'm not sure this would happen.  Setting up passwords and then distributing those passwords has a non-zero cost and offers zero visible benefits for most of the people who are using the wireless networks.[0]  And as another poster said, what about football/baseball stadiums?  Distributing passwords to tens of thousands of people is sort of difficult.  "Just watching the game" is not an option; people want to FaceTweet pictures of themselves at the game.

OTOH, the last time I looked at the access points visible from my living room, almost all of them had some sort of access control enabled. Maybe there's a social convention forming that "my access point" ~= "my back yard" and "open access point" ~= "a public park"?

[0] Having a more educated user population would make the benefits more visible, but it's very difficult to make people care about these things.

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