Comment by 8fingerlouie

The internet is not a friendly place, so a VPN is a great idea.

With modern tools like Wireguard, you can even set it up relatively easy, either as Wireguard alone or as Tailscale (or ZeroTier, though that's not Wireguard).

Wireguard (and Tailscale) allows you to setup the tunnel so that only local (RFC1918 ie) traffic is routed over it, meaning it won't eat up your battery like when just routing all traffic over it.

I have Wireguard setup like that. It enables on any Wi-Fi network that isn't mine, as well as cellular, and the battery impact is less than 2% over a day.