Wi-Fi Sense, for those unfamiliar, is a networking feature that lets users share their Wi-Fi credentials with friends. (You can also share your network password with Facebook “friends”, but that’s not automatic; it requires you to opt in.).
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According to reports today, Windows 10 shares your Wi-Fi details with anyone in your Outlook contacts, Skype friends lists and Facebook friends. There are definitely occasions when having your computer sharing your Wi-Fi password could be bad but it’s not likely to be the great security risk that some are making it out to be. Microsoft offered as an example the name mynetwork_optout. Googling “windows 10 wifi sense” yields several links to articles with titles ranging from “Why the Hell is Windows 10 Sharing My Wifi Passwords” to “What is Wi-Fi Sense and Why Does It Want Your Facebook Account”.
Windows 10’s new Wi-Fi Sense feature is a powerful tool that takes the headache out of managing Wi-Fi connections on the run. For every network you join, you’ll be asked if you want to share it with your friends/social networks.
Microsoft seems to have thought through the big risks: You control which contacts from which social networks get access to which networks (and if you don’t choose any, nothing happens), passwords are encrypted, and those passwords get sent up to a Microsoft server for safe storage, off of the actual device.
On the one hand, we tell people that they need to secure their data with strong passwords while research shows how passwords are trivial to hack – even many strong passwords can be cracked fairly easily. Well, they will be stored on your machine when upgrading to Windows 10 and they are shared by default. However, when connecting to a personal network, you’ll now see a new “Share network with my contacts” checkbox beneath the password entry box.
To disable Wi-Fi Sense in Windows 10, open the Network settings menu, go to Manage Wi-Fi settings, and switch the “On” switch to “Off”. Microsoft thinks you should, and so makes this a default setting of Windows 10. “If you choose to, you can later explicitly share those networks if you have the password”. You can also opt your network out of Wi-Fi Sense entirely by adding the phrase “_optout” to the end of your Wi-Fi network’s name.
Calling it “a disaster waiting to happen”, security expert Brian Krebs writes that because the Windows computer system is far more popular than its Phone OS, the new Wi-Fi feature is “a serious concern for much of the planet”. Wi-Fi Sense won’t work with a local account. Wi-Fi Sense is probably nothing to worry about for most people. When your friend’s PC decrypts your password, that makes it potentially accessible to your friend if he or she knows where to look – Wi-Fi Sense doesn’t make it easy, but it’s theoretically possible.
Ultimately, Wi-Fi Sense probably isn’t most secure feature in the world, but it isn’t that bad either.
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One feature that would’ve been nice is granular sharing with specific contacts: It would be useful (and more secure) if you could use Wi-Fi Sense to share with just a few friends on Facebook, rather than the whole smorgasbord of friends, old university buddies, and acquaintances that you only vaguely remember from a drunken night a few years back. I haven’t made any changes since and it remains a pleasant surprise to find that I am connected to Wi-Fi in a new town or shop. I don’t, and unless you are insane or work for the Windows 10 development team I doubt you will either…
