If you're taking up Microsoft on its offer of a free upgrade to Windows 10, you should know that the new operating system has a feature, called Wi-Fi Sense, that automatically shares your Wi-Fi passwords with others.
When Wi-Fi Sense is enabled, anyone you have in your Skype, Outlook or Hotmail contacts lists — and any of your Facebook friends — can be granted access to your Wi-Fi network as long as they're within range. Microsoft added this feature to save users' time and hassle, but as independent security blogger Brian Krebs put it, some security experts see it as "a disaster waiting to happen."
Krebs and others worry about the potential for strangers or untrustworthy friends being given access to users' home Wi-Fi networks. Microsoft has tried to reassure them by pointing out that you have to agree to enable Wi-Fi Sense every time you join a new network, that those people to whom you grant network access can't pass along that access to yet more people, and that the feature doesn't share an actual password, but rather an encrypted version of it.
Despite the safeguards, the issue is nonetheless dangerous for those users, and there are many of them, who agree to everything their computers ask of them. If they agree to share Wi-Fi Sense with their Facebook friends, then, yep, all of their Facebook friends will be given access to their networks. (We've already encountered this request from Windows 10, which didn't really explain what the feature entailed.)
Wi-Fi Sense makes sense if you're visiting a friend and don't want to enter a long string of random characters to get onto his or her network. But have you pruned your contacts lists down to just the people you trust? Are all of your Facebook friends really your friends? Probably not. Most people have many contacts or Facebook friends whom they barely know — would you really trust your Wi-Fi password with your second cousin's boyfriend, or that guy in the neighborhood who once fixed your toilet?
The other problem is that Wi-Fi Sense lets you share access to more networks than just your own. You can share access to any network that you got onto the old-fashioned way — by typing in the password. Wi-Fi Sense doesn't distinguish between your home network, your office network or your grandmother's home network. If you typed in the password, they're all fair game.
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