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)
93k access points run by a government that wants to read all our chats?
It’s amost like the EU isn’t a monolith and has various groups opposing each other.
Can they actually if the chats run via HTTPS? Isn’t the whole point that they can’t read any data that’s going through but instead only what server it’s going through? As long as it goes over an encrypted connection, but I think all of our chats use encrypted connection nowadays
No, they can’t.
What some parties in the EU want is to force chat services provider to give them access to chat messages, which destroys the entire point of encrypted chats and essentially bans E2E chat encryption
Vpns are cheap if that’s an issue
Is this new? If they write this despite recent border checks the analogy has not the intended meaning.
Vpns don’t hide mac addresses from phones that pass the access points.
Pretty much every phone can use random MAC addresses, so you can’t be tracked that way. Obviously there’s a ton of other ways to achieve that, like via that app.
That tracking is done in a much more effective and capillary way by tracking cell towers. I think MAC tracking is a much better option, assuming there are enough of these APs to track.
Yeah till they don’t allow VPNs on the network
you think most people will use a VPN?