A new feature in Windows 10 called WiFi Sense is drawing heat from some security experts who fear that it may compromise your network security, but the potential problems with the company’s approach don’t appear to be a problem for most people.
WiFi Sense helps friends and contacts connect to your WiFi network quickly, without the user having to give them the password. To do this, Microsoft stores the encrypted password on its servers, which it passes to your contacts’ machines to enable the connection.
Security experts including journalist Brian Krebs are raising concerns about the WiFi Sense feature, which is on by default in Windows 10.
However, ZDNet’s Ed Bott and others point out that you still have to explicitly click to share a specific network with your contacts automatically. Also, even if you do allow contacts to automatically connect to your network with WiFi Sense, they’re limited to connecting to the internet; they can’t access other connected devices or network drives through WiFi Sense.
And you can always turn off WiFi Sense altogether. Go into Settings > Network & Internet > Wi-Fi > Manage Wi-Fi Settings. There, you can choose if you want to share with contacts from Outlook, Skype and Facebook, as well as find out if you accidentally shared any networks you may not have meant to, and revoke that access.
Still, Krebs suggests renaming your WiFi network to keep it out of Microsoft’s collection service, following Microsoft’s guidance of adding the suffix “_optout” to the network name. He also worries that hackers might be able to break into networked computers with the new program.
