How To Protect Your Privacy When You’re Working In A Cafe

Walk into any café today and you’ll find as many laptops as unicorn frappuccinos. Starbucks and Costa Coffee might just as well market themselves as alternatives to WeWork. It’s pretty generous of those chains to create cheap offices for workers in the gig economy… with pretty good coffee on tap too. And that’s great. One of the benefits of working for yourself and doing your own thing, is that you can work anywhere. You can take your laptop and your Beats headphones and instead of working in the spare bedroom you can build your business from the corner of your local Java bar. You can even hold client meetings there. But spend any amount of time in those cafes and you’ll start to notice something. Not everyone is connected to the café’s wifi. A few people (and you can spot one or two of them in every busy café) will have connected to their phone’s hotspot instead of to the café’s own Internet. I see it often in airport lounges. Their reason won’t be that their Internet is faster, though it might be. They’ll be thinking of security. Log into some open connection in a café, and your computer is vulnerable to hacking. According to some experts, anyone sitting within a hundred feet of you — so that’s anyone in the café — can listen to everything you do on the Web. I’ve always thought that’s a bit paranoid. If you’re not a Pentagon general planning the invasion of North Korea, what are the chances that someone will want to know where you’re browsing? But a little paranoia isn’t always a bad thing. If you’ve got confidential data on your computer, or you’re browsing your finances, taking care of your privacy is a pretty good habit. What I find really strange though is that those people running through their mobile data allowance will usually be sitting in front of an open screen. No one in the café or the airport lounge will be able to view their browser history but everyone who heads to the counter to pick up their coffee (or runs to the bathroom to offload their coffee) can see exactly which sites they’re browsing and what they’re writing about it. And they will. There’s nothing more interesting than the sight of someone else’s computer screen. And it’s not like those café denizens don’t know. In one survey by the Ponemon Institute, 87 percent of mobile workers said they’ve caught someone looking at their screen in a public space. Three out of four were concerned about it, but less than half actually did something about it. That’s crazy because the solutions are simple. There are two of them. The first is to always sit in the corner of the café and tilt the screen so that no one else can see it. That’s great… if there’s a corner available. (Go find the corner next to an airport gate.) The other solution is to buy a Privacy Filter. 3M make them and they make sure that the screen is only viewable by someone sitting right in front of it. If you’re traveling or working in a café, they’re now pretty essential. Just don’t expect them to hide the fact that you’re drinking a unicorn frappuccino. This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of 3M. The opinions and text are all mine.

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