Public Wi-Fi in the Big Apple is officially here. The Verge reported that the first of the LinkNYC public Wi-Fi stations in New York City has gone live, moving out of the beta test phase. Eventually, this public-private partnership plans to deploy 7,500 of these access points.

While an undoubtedly useful municipal service, businesspeople must look at this — along with any publicly accessible network — with some suspicions. Employees need to know what security risks they and their organization’s data are exposed to via such a service.

On its website, LinkNYC said, “We take your privacy very seriously and will never sell any personal information or share with third parties for their own use,” but other bad actors may try to use these locations as staging areas for criminal exploits.

Traffic Teams Are Watching

CityBridge, the group that designed the hubs, took some security precautions prior to the launch. First, it installed a series of filters and proxies that it claims will block anyone who tries to download malware.

CityBridge also has a team dedicated to monitoring traffic. If the team sees a user receiving data from a command-and-control server, it is able to end the session immediately. The sites also go into a hard reset after 15 seconds of inactivity, which should remove any malware that tries to take root on a device.

Sniffing Users

The sniffing of user data sent through unencrypted connections to websites is another possibility. There are two ways around this: The first is to connect to a website through an SSL connection.

The second is to use the private network that these access points will provide. The private network is currently available only for Apple devices running iOS 7 and above. It is free to the public, but in order to access it, users do need to accept the network’s key, The Verge reported.

Spoofing Users on Public Wi-Fi

That private network may also help in a spoofing attack. If a user has already connected to a LinkNYC access point, someone may try to have a network out there with the same SSID name. Devices that automatically join known networks may simply join it without telling the user, making them vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle (MitM) attack. The MitM-enabling network could then try to collect data. But if the user has already signed up for the LinkNYC private network, then this sort of attack will fail.

USB ports in LinkNYC hubs are meant to charge devices and are configured to be incapable of transmitting data. Yet a skimmer could be installed on the port, similar to those used by attackers on ATMs. Vibration sensors on the ports should put a stop to these efforts, however, as well as to any vandalism on the port.

Data Sharing in Normal Use

The group that runs the hubs will display ads on them, and it may target those ads based on the personal information your device shares with any connection. According to Re/code, one party interested in this data may be Sidewalk Labs — an investor in LinkNYC that’s also a subsidiary of Alphabet, Google’s parent company. Even in protected use, the Wi-Fi kiosks may be able to collect your information and share with major corporations.

There will always be a trade-off between ease of use and security. It may be very handy to have this access in New York, but never forget that the hot spots must be approached carefully.