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.
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.
Title is wrong. It’s an old initiative, not even funded anymore. Ran from 2018 to 2020 with 120 Million EUR.
One of their access points has saved my skin twice now in the past 2 months, so I’m happy it exists.
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.
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.
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.
But why an App & not a PWA ?
Would have been nice indeed, however there is a web version: https://wifi4eu.ec.europa.eu/#/list-accesspoints
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.
Ahh yes, border free travel… wait a minute, why are the Austrian police on the border here? Wait a minute, why are they stopping us…
Because it’s border free travel for EU citizens. It’s still another country you enter, as of course, there are rules.
They stop you to check. You obviously pass through.
Also, there’s still illegal import rules.
It’s still schengen rules, so if you take a train the likelihood of being stopped at the border is pretty low. Austria may have border agents board the train and verify passports, but that’s still pretty uncommon in Europe.
So, if I live in the EU, what’s stopping me from cancelling my home plan and making the wifi experience worse for everyone?
Limiting the bandwidth use of individual devices is pretty easy, and basically standard procedure for public networks. Even cheap consumer routers that come with ISP subscriptions can do that.
The fact that there’s 93k access points and that’s not very many when you consider the size of the EU and the average range and speed of an access point.
This seems a bit wasteful. Everyone already has a phone with network connection, most having infinite data, and statistics are rapidly improving. I don’t remember the last time I had to use public wifi, feels a bit outdated and insecure.
Just because you have the option and can afford it does not mean every european citizen can have it or afford it.
EU policies aren’t just for the privileged.
most having infinite data
That’s a bold claim. Do you have some official figures to back that up? Where I live, I don’t know of anyone with truly unlimited mobile internet.
The cheaper unlimited tariffs cost around €30, but have at least one of the following restrictions:
- Speed limit after x volume used
- Poor network coverage
- <15MBit/s speed
- Significantly increased costs after 2 years of contract term
- Cancellation by provider if consumption is too high
- only a few Gb at full speed included in EU roaming
Genuine unlimited contracts with stable network coverage and 300 Mbit/s usually cost around €80-100 per month here. And unlimited EU roaming is still not included by default.
That’s a bold claim. Do you have some official figures to back that up?
I somehow assumed that if we have reasonable plans, limits and laws in east europe, surely you have it better in central european hub, you know? But no, I lazied out on checking the official figures, but where I live, I rarely hear about someone paying for limited plan, it’s just not worth it to save 10€ and worry about hitting walls.
Speaking of slow speeds, I live in semi-rural area and here’s my speedtest: https://www.speedtest.net/my-result/a/11047555422 (on 5G)
Here in France we have “Free” (which is not free, costs 20€/month) which is not unlimited but something like 250GB/month last time I looked, and frequently increasing. I never ran out of data.
Infinite data is not a thing, especially not outside the home country.
What do you mean by this? It’s literally a thing. As soon as I cross a country border, I even get a message saying “Keep enjoying unlimited data abroad”, while torrenting nearly terabyte a month. Paying 26€ per month.
Good for you. What makes you think every country has the same package available?
Literal eu law that says they can’t charge roaming?
Not charging roaming does not mean that your unlimited plan carries over abroad. It just means you can’t be charged more for using your plan abroad.
It is still legal and widely done to have different limits abroad vs domestic.
- Not everybody in the EU is living in the EU.
- I didn’t mention roaming. Not everybody has the same unlimited data for cheap package
- From my understanding, the no-roaming charge law is being ignored pretty widely, in spirit if not in letter (different quota if at home vs roaming).
They don’t charge roaming, but they are allowed to sell limited-data plans. Those plans are also limited abroad. This is okay.
Sure you can get unlimited plans but they axe extremely expensive and not worth it for normal people. I don’t stream terabytes on my phone. I use my unlimited home DSL for that.
Roaming not but there might not be the same price and package somehwere Else in the EU…
Well I don’t know if that’s a good use of EU money. I’d rather see investments in large and difficult infrastructure, rail, software, datacenters, industrial sectors we’re currently lacking, grid investments - stuff like that.
End user internet access is more like thousands of small decentralised projects. The coordination might make it easier to use compared to if everyone did their own free wifi project, but that’s such a small benefit…
As always, it’s not like both aren’t possible. As a matter of fact, there is a lot of railway projects ongoing at the same time, to only quote one of your examples.
A government can take care of more than one issue at a time, luckily.
It may be a small benefit for you (I assume you are german based on your server), but not every european country or citizen has the same access to internet. This is a good initiative, but obviously not primarily intended for the richer citizens/countries of the union.
I would say it’s a small benefit for anyone. It’s not like people will walk to the town square, or the park or the hospital to use some free EU Wifi.
The title is also very wrong I found out. It’s not being launched. It’s not even funded any more.
Wifi4EU ran from 2018 to 2020 with a funding of 120 million EUR. They paid up to 15 thousand EUR for equipment and installation per municipality, the local municipalities had to pay for the internet service and maintenance.
This is the result: https://wifi4eu.ec.europa.eu/#/list-accesspoints
Still looks like a pointless exercise to me.
My city runs it’s own wifi hotspots all over the city, and it is quite a nice feature, especially if your data plan isn’t very good.
15k for several distinct hotspots in a city is pretty reasonable, depending on what equipment they are using.
Enterprise quality IT gear is expensive. Each access point can easily be 1k, and that excludes any routers/firewall/switching that you may need at each site. As an example, I’ve worked in places that had small retail locations that at a minimum had 8k of network equipment, with some locations pushing into the 100k+ range based on needs and size. That’s per site. The above is all in USD, but just equipment. Labor can add 30% to the costs.
15k euro for a whole city that includes equipment and installation sounds very fiscally responsible.
I’m sure we could invest in all of them and money wouldn’t be the problem.
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.
‘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!
No taking on EU -run wifi? Those f’rs want to read our private encrypted chats. Why would anyone connect to this?
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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The EU is not a singular entity. It is possible for it to do good and evil simultaneously.
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.
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.
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>
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.
Why Wi-Fi? All the expense, none of the coverage.
Good luck trying to break through the mobile cartels.
Honestly nowadays data plans are cheap on most mobile carriers and they’re obligated to have them work accross EU, so you no longer really need Wi-Fi when traveling.
Also, I can see this being easily and constantly exploited via Wi-Fi attacks where hackers set up fake Hotspots with the same name as the closest legit one.
I’m sure non-EU visitors will like it
Getting their credentials stolen thru WiFi attack?
This is not really a common or easy attack, especially for any meaningful service (that is probably in preloaded HSTS lists).
It’s not like this is the only shared network. In airports millions of people everyday connect to the same network.
Cries in Brexit
~£2 a day data charge on most UK networks
Isn’t Lebara less than that per month and includes roaming?
The more competitive networks tend to include EU roaming as standard. The ones that charge a lot - like the £2/day mentioned - tend to be the ones with captive customers like Sky, for example, where most of their customers also have TV and broadband from them so they’re stuck.
Meanwhile Czech carrier cartel:
BTW free Wi-Fi exploits are overrated with widespread HSTS
Why is it written with USD?
Only the rich can afford to pay per GB
I have a free 1 MiB/day plan. I only pay €8/year to top up the prepaid SIM. This would be AMAZING in 2005 but now the number of webpages that work on my 2G feature phone via Opera Mini is shrinking. Not to mention, there is no privacy because of the transcoding server. A stock-firmware 4G smartphone would eat through this data in a minute just with background apps calling home.
With the right software (rooted Android, custom clients, transcoding server at home) one could theoretically get all day of use of text- and sparsely image-based services such as email, RSS, SSH, timetables, Lemmy… I’d need at least a data blocker for backhround apps, a kiB meter in the notification bar and a confirmation pop-up for every transaction above 10 kiB (this can be estimated by content length).
Damn, this is so cool.
We could have had this in the States too, but, well, you all know.This would be cool 20 years ago. Now it’s just a stunt.
Better late than never though
It shows you are american and not familiar with the EU.
‘privacy friendly’ is a euphemistic PR term, not unlike making the horrible Patriot Act worse and renaming it the ‘Freedom Act’.Do you have other examples? I am really curious when they said privacy friendly and ended up snooping.
I’ll copy my answer to an EU fanboy:
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 youPlenty 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.
This will never be possible in the States. We still have areas with no cellular.
Ironically enough there’s basically a private version of this through Comcast turning their rented CPEs into their own unlicensed wifi mesh, they call it WiFi Pass – they at least have the courtesy to give it to you gratis if you’re already paying for residential service.
Surely that’s unrelated to the billions of dollars that the telecom companies stole from the taxpayer after promising to build out infrastructure?
