DescentBB

IPad and iPhone - If I go to a place that has free Wi-Fi, is there a way to protect myself from spying eyes?

What about a laptop Windows computer? I think I can use Firefox portable on the laptop. How protected when I be using it?

If you are that paranoid; don't use free wifi.

For a windows computer, using a portable browser is completely meaningless and accomplishes absolutely nothing to protect your privacy from free wifi or any other form of tracking.

Using a VPN will prevent people from spying on your traffic over the wifi locally (because it will be encrypted), but it won't stop companies (facebook, google, microsoft, etc) from tracking what you do on the internet once you pass through the VPN because that all happens at the destination server level when you connect or log in or even just because of session cookies that get automatically stored by your browser. It also won't prevent the NSA from listening in to everything you do because they blanket scan and record everything on the internet.

Any suggestions on free VPN's?

You can techincally make your own VPN, it would mean leaving a computer on or using custom firmware on a router.

But you ask similar questions many times in the past, you might need rethink your paranoia.

Always looking for a new easy solution. Oh well. Thanks!

So... VPN/SSH will get you a secure tunnel back to the server - the free wifi people will be able to see that you're talking to your server, but won't see through the encryption. To do that, you need to have a server running... and the connection from the server to the wider internet won't be encrypted, but then it'll also hopefully be a connection that you trust. If you want to mask the fact that you're even talking to your server, you could look into TOR, but I bet it's overkill for your purposes.