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I'm trying to reason why you suggest "if the VPN is free". If the VPN is free, I'm confident that I'm paying the VPN provider using my browsing data rather than money. A paid VPN service (somewhat) instills that small amount of trust that my browsing data is not stored/tracked/sold.

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I meant like Algo. My point was only that the threat here is so small as to not be worth spending real money to mitigate it.

But I'm being a bit tongue in cheek--most users are not going to want to set up Algo. And you're right that otherwise, the VPN is probably as sketchy as the wifi itself.

Algo is interesting! First time hearing about it, thanks :).

This is what I use when:

a) I'm traveling b) I remember to turn it on c) I'm not blocked by the wifi (which is common)

IOW, while Algo is great, and I'm pretty paranoid, "distrusting public wifi" is sufficiently far down my personal threat model stack rank that I don't really care about it much.

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