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by Tor3 9 days ago
Way less than before, but, as an example, the supermarket very close to my home (in my home country - my other comment elsewhere is about our home in Japan) has an open network. It's presumably so that when customers are there then the supermarket's app, on customers phones, will have access to coupons and the like. My own phone utilizes that (I don't use a data plan with that phone, as I mostly use it for calls and not having a data plan saves me a ton of money - it's basically free).
1 comments

I've seen a lot of open networks in stores, cafes and malls in my country too but on most occasions they at least take you to a captive portal to accept their TOS or ask you to enter an email address to spam you later, they are not just connect and browse with zero interaction.
There are still connect-and-use ones, like the one I mentioned, and the rest of them (fortunately there aren't that many which requires an email address anymore, though some exist) are just uselessly annoying. Airports, for example, always try to go through a 'connect' phase, and on Android that's sent through some Android-tool which often don't even work for some of those networks. And for no reason - TOS is useless, and sometimes there's not even a TOS - it's just a "connect' button. All of that makes it hard, sometimes impossible to connect, for absolutely zero reason. :-(