Wireless Internet is a strange business. On the one hand, you have a lot of people who swear that it is the best thing to ever happen to the ease and productivity of their lives. But on the other hand, you have the simple fact that wifi is not a secure means of getting online. While opinions differ on whether or not the future holds any methods of securing the wireless Web, almost everyone agrees that for now, it is not the kind of place where you should be doing anything of a personal nature.
If you care about your identity and having it stay under your power (as opposed to a thief’s), you are going to want to avoid wifi at every cost. If there is a wire that you can connect to, even if the connection is potentially untrustworthy (such as in a library), this is still the superior method of making sure your information stays in your hands, as opposed to being literally thrown all over the place, as wifi does. By its very definition, a wifi signal is destined to bounce around everywhere, making it a wide open venue by which anyone who is in your vicinity can easily pick up (and therefore steal) your information for their own nefarious purposes.
Of course, avoiding wireless signals can often be tricky, since some communities are literally beaming them everywhere. If all else fails for you, you can simply disable your computer’s wifi capabilities. Just make absolutely certain that no matter what you do, you do not get onto a wifi network if you intend to do anything more private than surfing around for general information. Anything more than that won’t go well.