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How to disable the annoying Secure Wi-Fi on the Samsung Galaxy S10
Samsung has always been big on features — throwing anything and everything in its software in the hopes to gain some bragging rights. In recent years, it kind of re-imagined how it goes about all the features — supposedly, Samsung is only focused on making stuff that the user would find to be actually practical and useful.
Practical as they may be, there are still a whole lot of settings to go through on a brand new Galaxy S10. And you may not want to use all of them. However, in order to keep you informed of their existence, Samsung will make sure to send you a notification or a settings banner, reminding you there's something you need to do.
Among them is the Secure Wi-Fi feature. When the phone detects that you are connected via a Wi-Fi network that it does not deem secure, you will be prompted to activate this feature.
What is Secure Wi-Fi? Well, it runs your traffic through a filter, powered by McAffee's antivirus, to make sure that you are not downloading anything malicious, or that nobody is trying to nab your data as you are casually browsing on a public network.
But it's not free. Well, not exactly. You can use Secure Wi-Fi for up to 250 MB of traffic (per month), and then you need to pay a small fee to unlock it for unlimited surfing.
Is that really needed? Not by everyone, no. Especially when Secure Wi-Fi pops up when you connect to your own home Wi-Fi. But it's certainly annoying when that persistent notification pops up every time your phone is on a network.
So, if you're not using Secure Wi-Fi, you may want to scrape it altogether. Or, you may want to keep the feature, but would like it to stay away from your notifications.
There are two methods of taking care of it. One will disable Secure Wi-Fi for you, the other will leave it intact, but will "silence" it, so you only have to deal with it when you head into Settings yourself.
I. Disable Secure Wi-Fi
If you don't want to ever use this feature, you might just want to get rid of it entirely. Go into Settings → Apps → Secure Wi-Fi.
There, you will notice you can't "Disable" the app. No worries, there's another solution. Go into Storage and then tap Clear Data and Clear Cache. You're done.
The next time you connect to a Wi-Fi network, you will get a notification from Secure Wi-Fi. Dismiss it and you will never need to worry about it again. Basically, this leaves Secure Wi-Fi "inactive" on your phone and it's buried pretty far down your Settings menus, so you won't go activating it by accident.
II. Silence Secure Wi-Fi but keep it active
If you would rather have Secure Wi-Fi stay active on your phone, but stay out of your notifications and not activate itself automatically, we can do that.
Go into Settings → Connections → Wi-Fi → Advanced → Secure Wi-Fi.
In here, you want to disable "Auto protect unsecured Wi-Fi". Then, tap the triple dot menu in the top right and open Settings. Here, you can disable notifications, so Secure Wi-Fi doesn't pester you again.
