It is summer time and people are traveling for vacation. Heading to hotels, campgrounds, parks, and friends. If your like my family you have many devices you take with you; tablets, smart phones, laptops, and all kinds of wifi devices. As people travel they see free public wifi for use. Please understand that these networks are not secure. The connection you have to the internet is unknown to you. And you should treat any unknown connection as not secure.
The best way to make sure you are connecting to the internet safely is to use a VPN on these insecure networks. I recommend wifi-vpn.com as a inexpensive service to use. The VPN connection from any of your devices will encrypt the data that travels over the public wifi to the destination VPN service, then out to the internet.
There are some great articles explaining both the reason to use a VPN and also how a VPN works. This is a simple to read easy article explaining more information:
http://gizmodo.com/5990192/vpns-what-they-do-how-they-work-and-why-youre-dumb-for-not-using-one
VPN services are easy to use and most all operating systems and devices have an option for built in VPN. I use PPTP as the protocol even though it was considered the less secure of all the VPN methods it still performs and secures your information.