Windows 10 WiFi Sense Wont Share your Passwords – Ever!

The new Windows 10 has a features called WiFi Sense, and it is a huge convenience, but so far a lot of people seem to think it has a problem with sharing WiFi passwords.

Thankfully, that’s not what’s going on at all. Windows 10 doesn’t share your WiFi passwords with anyone. Ever!

WiFi Sense is specifically designed to make sharing and connecting to wireless networks easier among trusted contacts. Contacts meaning, your family members and friends that you chat with on Skype and Facebook. All you have to do is pick a network, share it out, and then choose who has access to it, and they’ve got access whenever they drop past your place.

The great thing here is that they never have to type in your passphrase, all they have to do is turn on the option to “connect to networks shared by my contacts” enabled in Windows 10’s WiFi settings. WiFi Sense grants them access, it doesn’t reveal to them anything about your password. They also don’t have access to resources on your network, so they can look through your private documents, photos or files.

Sharing also isn’t turned on by default; you have to manually enable sharing in order for any of your friends or family that has Windows 10 to be able to connect to your network. Your network also isn’t shared forever at the click of a button, you have the option to turn it on or off whenever you like.

Microsoft has also built WiFi Sense to ignore certain SSIDs. If you really don’t want to run the risk of having someone connect via WiFi Sense, you can simply change the SSID by adding _optout to it and the machines sniffing for a connection will ignore it. If you’ve enabled MAC address filtering on your router, a WiFi Sense connection won’t do anyone any good, either

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WiFi Sense is definitely not the security risk that many people have made it out to be, and there are easy ways to keep it from being a problem. One thing that would help keep it from being a risk would be to not let strangers sit outside your house with their laptops!

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