Neighbors Want To Connect To Neighborly WiFi

from the misreading-a-study... dept

2Wire, a company that sells WiFi equipment, has done a small study of customers who say that, if the opportunity arose, they would connect to their neighbor's WiFi system. I don't think this is at all surprising. However, from there, the interpretation spins out of control. I don't know if it's the study, itself, or the reporter writing the article about the study that takes "connect to a neighbor's WiFi connection" and twists that into "snoop around and look at their private info". That's quite a leap from one to the other. Most people would (and do) connect to their neighbor's WiFi because it's an easy way to get on the internet. I've been to friends' apartments where you can pick up five or six open WiFi signals and I'll connect to the one that's most convenient/fastest. It's not because I'm trying to snoop around their network, but because the connection is there. Many people leave their connections open on purpose, as a way of sharing the bandwidth. Equating connecting to an open network with "snooping around" is misleading.