cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/25779751
The intative promises to be privacy-friendly with no tracking. Stating:
Your privacy is important. The WiFi4EU app ensures a private online experience with no tracking or data collection. Simply connect and enjoy free public Wi-Fi without concerns.
Source: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/wifi4eu-citizens
Will be interesting to see how this spans and plays out in reality. Looks promising too, did a quick scan of their builtin permissions and trackers and looks good too. (Scanning tool is called Exodus)
I want to be European so bad.
But why an App & not a PWA ?
Why not both?
PWAs are easy to maintain & lightweight
Not saying they aren’t, just that a lot of folks will probably search their phone’s app store and if they don’t see it assume it doesn’t exist for their phone.
Would have been nice indeed, however there is a web version: https://wifi4eu.ec.europa.eu/#/list-accesspoints
Why Wi-Fi? All the expense, none of the coverage.
Good luck trying to break through the mobile cartels.
Do you need that app to connect to a WiFi network?
To add to the other comment, you can see the map here.
No, the app is just a map of the hotspots.
Free Wireless ISP, you say?
cheapskate romanian sounds
Oh, sure. That’s fair. Just like how the US kicked the Natives off of their land. </sarcasm>
Classic European flavored racism. Are you aware that you are promoting racism or not? I think mindfulness is key here. People should consider their own internal biases and adjust to help make a better world.
Pretty sure they are themselves Romanian.
Can you even be racist against yourself?
Yes you can. And the term Romanian isn’t the problem here.
Yes, I live in Romania.
It was a joke, but also true.
I don’t see the racist part, but please excuse me if I’ve offended you.
descurcăreț - someone who makes use of the flaws in rulings. It’s not even a negative term.
<sincerity> Sorry about the other response I made being accusatory. I get the difference between self-deprecating humor about one’s family, and actual boomerang racism. Thanks for clearing things up. </sincerity>
If Hule wants to make cheapskate Romanian sounds he’s allowed to. It’s his goddamn choice whether he wants to be a cheapskate or not.
Germans are gonna start getting out their old cantennas or nanostations and point it at the closest hotspot
Of course I would never do such a thing, being half german, living in Germany. Certainly didn’t live off a nearby restaurants wifi hotspot for almost 2 years.
No taking on EU -run wifi? Those f’rs want to read our private encrypted chats. Why would anyone connect to this?
The EU is not a singular entity. It is possible for it to do good and evil simultaneously.
Because people know about HTTPS.
They want to be able to read all the communications. So whether you transport your data via https or not has nothing to do with this.
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Not all internet traffic is chats
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If they have backdoor access to chats it doesn’t matter if you use their WiFi or not.
To be fair (op seems tech illiterate but he might have a point) you could track MAC addresses. My phone randomise my MAC but maybe every phone doesn’t ?
What will tracking MACs give them? They will now that such and such MAC address connected to such and such WiFi router. What will they do with it? What is the risk here?
Your MAC is unique to your *physical" device so there’s that, also you could track movement globally. I guess there are other things I’m not thinking about but 2 just on top of my head is clearly 2 too many IMO.
I get that but what the European Commission would do with this info? They would be able to tell that you visited Berlin in May or that you went to Portugal in June. And… what? They will not sell this data to advertisers because that would be just stupid. Would they share this data with police? For what purpose? Would Ursula von der Leyen use it to track her political opponents? See where they went on holiday? What would be the point?
I wouldn’t be concern about the MAC addresses but about the app mentioned in the article. Why do you need an app for this? What data will it collect about you?
AFAIK every semi-modern phone does mac address randomisation now
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Leaving the EU is one of the stupidest self harming things we ever did.
Who are you?
I’m the former prime minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Tony Blair. Who are you?
UK if I have to guess.
And I’m glad that the UK left the EU, because now the EU has its own Cuba in front of its shores. Makes life more interesting, doesn’t it?
‘privacy-friendly’ from the EU? 😂
they’ll read your messages, but they’re friendly about it.
Well they have to check for our own good OC, what if Khammaaaz mails you a terrorist!
I think this is mostly for non-EU tourists. You don’t pay for roaming in EU anymore so you don’t really need WiFi when traveling.
If I had this in the US, I’d be cancelling my cellular service entirely, I’d still keep my home service though, to VPN into it for a bit more security when using a public wifi connection.
I would also just transfer my phone number to one of those cheap voip providers, then just use voip from my phone everywhere.
you wouldn’t be happy with that. i looked up how the Wifi routers are distributed, and (in Austria at least) small towns have 1-2 routers placed in the municipal buildings they have, servicing the town square. Which means you would have to sit around inside or outside of city hall all day.
Yes, it’s not like poor people or children with abusive parents need library wifi to do anything important like looking up how to deal with life’s shit when their parents never taught them how. </sarcasm>
bro, i never said anything about people in bad situations; it’s clear that they profit from that and that’s a great thing. but cancelling your cell service to use this instead is not a smart move.
Ehhh… I would maybe cancel the data part of my plan, but I dunno how comfortable I would be relying on notoriously spotty and insecure public Wi-Fi services to make or receive phone calls.
Well, speak for yourself. I don’t have a running phone contract because I don’t really use my phone much for calling or stick to open WiFi when I need to be online. Just got top-up mobile data for the times when there is no WiFi.
I definitely do want WiFi when travelling.
Recently mobile phone operators introduced a “fair use policy”, so it’s not really a”roam like at home” anymore, but data volumes can be limited to a fraction of what you are entitled to in your home country.
This is a point where WiFi might get more important again when traveling.
Title is wrong. It’s an old initiative, not even funded anymore. Ran from 2018 to 2020 with 120 Million EUR.
my bad! I misread the context and had not heard of it before - yet living in the EU. I will change the title. I got confused as I saw their post on LinkedIn, and it was posted recently: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/european-commission_wifi4eu-activity-7359136374895046656-oXYi
It’s still active as in, they maintain the hotspots. But I just had a look at the map, and it looks like there’s spotty service mostly clustered around tiny villages, rather than providing coverage to areas that actual get significant tourism or other visitors.
One of their access points has saved my skin twice now in the past 2 months, so I’m happy it exists.
A bit offtopic about a pet peeve of mine, but this is why it’d be super nice if social media that end up getting screenshot had absolute timestamps. Thank you for letting us know.
35E/month per access point for 3 years, it’s not too bad if they got actual use, if that means where ever you go there will be free internet at hand that can be relied upon and that will even save the precious RF bandwidth of cell phone towers and reduces cell phone subscription by an equivalent amount
if that means where ever you go there will be free internet at hand that can be relied upon
Yeah if that were the case it could be useful. Unfortunately the map looks pretty bad: https://wifi4eu.ec.europa.eu/#/list-accesspoints
They seem pretty evenly distributed to me ?
Sure there are a few everywhere, but the big gaps are the issue.
For example in your screenshot if you zoom in on Poitiers you’ll see there are none there, only in the two northern neighbor communes Neuville de Poitou and Jaunay-Clan. Similar for Nantes, none there, they are all in Saint-Sébastien-Sur-Loire and Thouaré-sur-Loire, the center and all the other suburbs have nothing.
Ah ok yes I see what you mean, Poitiers has none and is clearly some big place
While “Le Bourg” probably a rich place, has a whole bunch of them
Of course getting the density of Poitiers for all of Europe on 120 million for 3 years is never going to happen on this approach.
Even though 35$/month per hotspot is reasonable. It’s just not the right approach. In reality nearly every single building in Europe has an internet connection and wifi routers.
Since there is not really such a thing as “keeping the RF spectrum of wifi to oneself” The logical approach would have been to socially engineer the default that ALL wifi hotspot would offer any random guest, free throttled courtesy internet access. Something that the ISPs have fervently opposed, something industry has made sure would not happen, at least not by accident. Through hardware design and the dissemination of horror stories. A more competent state would have used this money to just massage the existing infrastructure in opening up to their fellow citizens rather than try and build a parallel infrastructure with brute force money.
I hope they get their shit together and strong arm vendors into a more pro-social private infrastructure, since that essentially free at this point for all intents and purposes.
That’s cool. Here in the US, we’re this close to banning vaccines. *sad trombone sound
Having a union-wide regulatory framework for soda bottle caps, or mandatory categorization of cucumbers seems a lot less like a government overreach in comparison. Thanks, I guess… 🥲
I hope you’re joking.
If this does what it says on the box its huge
It’s mind-blowing how at the same time some EU government guys pushing stuff like DSA while other do something like this (which is nice, and a complete opposite, if it’s not honeypot anyways).
Indeed from their history of constantly wanting more control and invasive measures, always sold in the name of security, protection of minors, etc… I’m highly sceptical and always asume the worst.
But those are all publicly available pieces of legislation. It’s quite a leap to go from that to just assuming they’ll secretly and illegally spy on you through public wifi networks, without any law allowing them to do so. Besides, if they have no problem doing that, why would internet through your European ISP be any safer?
Never said the rest is safer, doesn’t mean they are ‘privacy friendly’, they aren’t.
It’s quite a leap to go from that to just assuming they’ll secretly and illegally spy on you
Plenty of stuff like this or this or this
And they did as much against Pegasus as they do against israel.
Some words and recommendations.22 EU clients, at least, have acquired it.
quite a leap to go from that to just assuming they will not spy on you as a collective, more than is already ‘publicly available’.
Organisations that spy usually don’t advertise their practices.Plenty of stuff like this or this or this
Again, those are all pushes for legislation. None of which are implemented at this point. The EU is, for better and for worse, a bureaucratic monster. Anything it does has to go through a long process involving multiple oversight comittees, the commission, the parliament etc. It really doesn’t have the option for much secrecy. National governments are quite a different story.
. Anything it does has to go through a long process involving multiple oversight comittees, the commission, the parliament etc. It really doesn’t have the option for much secrecy.
Oh my sweet summer child.
When a German MEP Patrick Breyer asked the EU to release the names of the people who were a part of the so called High Level Group that wrote this proposal, they replied with a list with all names blacked out. Here is Patrick Breyer’s own blog post on the subject.
According to Edri ”The HLG has kept its work sessions closed, by strictly controlling which stakeholders got invited and effectively shutting down civil society participation.”.
And that’s why I trust no one! Oh, wait. I’m lonely and miserable.
Saddest man indeed
What’s the problem with the Digital Services Act?
They tried to push it to the point of stripping encryption from internet altogether and when that didn’t work they tried demanding chat apps to be able to scan people messages before they send them. Maybe I’m confusing multiple entirely different things here, but I kinda heard that mostly with the abbreviation DSA flying around so I assumed it was sorta umbrella for all those things.
Nah that’s Chat Control. DSA is about online platforms while Chat Control is about private chats.
yeah the DSA seems good to me, largely because it mostly adresses vlops being shitty
Yeah, of all the things to criticise the EU for the DSA is a bizarre pick. Challenging techbro dominance with simple and technically-sensible demands on the gatekeepers is a win for the average person in my book.
Get fucked Leyen-cunt and chat control shitpiles. Of course you treasonous monsters want people connected everywhere so you can spy on them whereever. I hope you all die miserable, hated and alone one day.
Not trusting the idea on it’s face. Love to hear tech details on why I should.
Also more circuses for less bread
More Europeans than ever can watch the live-streamed genocide that we’ve been arming and encouraging!
And have to walk on eggshells if they protest against it or get arrested for ‘supporting terrorism’.
Through various deliberately InterPol-managed servers that track your telemetry.
