# Why do people trust Xfinity wifi outside the home?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-people-trust-xfinity-wifi-outside-the-home/761423>\
**Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\
**Created:** [August 1, 2016, 12:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-people-trust-xfinity-wifi-outside-the-home/761423 "2016-08-01T00:12:33Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Leaper](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/4bbf92/32.png) [@Leaper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leaper)\
**Post date:** [August 1, 2016, 12:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-people-trust-xfinity-wifi-outside-the-home/761423/1 "2016-08-01T00:12:33Z")

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So a while back, Xfinity introduced a system of free wifi hotspots for subscribers piggybacking off residential and commercial wifi.

My question is, why does anyone connect to them? Why can’t a hacker just name his compromised network with the same name as all of their other hotspots and harvest passwords to his heart’s content? At least with business based wifi, you’ll probably see something is wrong when you see two networks with the same name (although even then, I set my wifi to not automatically connect just because of name).

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**Author:** ![boffking](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/858c86/32.png) [@boffking](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/boffking)\
**Post date:** [August 1, 2016, 2:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-people-trust-xfinity-wifi-outside-the-home/761423/2 "2016-08-01T02:36:47Z")

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People are lazy. Even in highly regulated environments like hospitals, people are reckless with data for the sake of convenience.