If the ability to track citizens doesn't ring a bell for you I have a bridge to sell...

Of course it will be abused, not by the king of Spain but surely by other more subtle and indirect means. Sometimes it's the paranoia of a leader, look up Stasi in East Germany, they knew loads about their citizens, and they used it in lots of bad ways.

So freedom of not being tracked is something you shouldn't not want because why allow it in the first place?

Title is wrong. It's an old initiative, not even funded anymore. Ran from 2018 to 2020 with 120 Million EUR.

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

I think you're just confused about the purpose of this scheme. This is not a plan to connect everyone in EU to a WiFi routers controlled by the government. Mobile data plans in Europe are cheap, people don't use public WiFi when they walk around. This is aimed at people that travel abroad and non-EU tourists. Even the tweet says "stay connected wherever your travels take you". If your idea was to use some app to automatically connect to all available public WiFis all the time I agree it's a bad idea. It will leak your precise location to many different actors. But this is not the plan here. It's to offer WiFi when you're traveling. And guess what? Everyone knows already where you travel. You use your ID to checking into a flight, to register at a hotel, in many places you have to inform the police about your stay and pay some fees not to mention that you spend money all the time when you travel. Worrying about connecting to a public WiFi in other country because EU will track your MAC is some tinfoil hat level paranoia, that's it.

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.

Forgive me for not covering 100% of this advanced topic in my 3 paragraphs on Lemmy... Nuance gets long, and most people have attention spans of a squirrel.

maybe it’s hard to distinguish between google services, but if you play some online game, chat over whatsapp or signal, or have a voip call, that’s an entirely different story.

Already covered as

That leaves just the raw connection analysis…

Where specifics can't be divined... but other details might.

these can probably be told apart by DNS requests

Addressed already with

DNS by default is often plaintext. You can setup your device to use DoH or other encrypted versions of DNS.

when having a voip call, through a service that supports peer to peer calls (most do, and it’s default on), an observer may even be able to deduct something about who you are speaking with, like what general area they live at.

Actually this is quite unlikely. ASNs are not as structured as you think. It takes an external database that specifically tracks DHCP'd ISP addresses. Case in point, when I moved to my new house... Google maps though I was a good 60 miles away from where I was... it was after repeated access to google maps and other service for about a month before maps started getting accurate with where I'm accessing their service from.

And that point is covered with

It would take a bunch of external additional data to actually tie you to anything directly, eg server logs or other sources… which usually means more than one party is already working together against you. At that point you’ve got bigger issues usually.

then what if you have apps that try to establish connections to services at home.

If you purposefully steer your car off the road... of course you're going to crash. If you're going to expose non-encrypted things onto the internet...

At that point you’ve got bigger issues usually.

I would suspect the untrusted wifi to NOT be the leading thing you'd want to care about in this situation. But even then... I would start making reasonable assumptions such as you're likely on a DHCP connection without static addressing... your site and resources will rotate IPs every once in a while. Makes tracking you even harder.

with HTTPS you leak your internal domain names because of TLS SNI.

Encrypted SNI (ESNI) / Encrypted Client Hello (ECH) exists... Cloudflare for example supports ECH, and they transit a LOT of data.

But once again... would be outside of the scope of discussion here. Yes... an ISP can make an educated guess of where you're likely to be going... and maybe even make a reasonable guess of what you could doing... But certainly not the details of it.

And this all ignores the fact that a random coffee shop isn't going to do full packet inspection to get this data to begin with. It's not worth it for them. They gain very little from collecting meta data without some bigger company backing them to do so... Which falls under

It would take a bunch of external additional data to actually tie you to anything directly, eg server logs or other sources… which usually means more than one party is already working together against you. At that point you’ve got bigger issues usually.

Edit: Typo that changed meaning. Fixed.

Title is wrong. It's an old initiative, not even funded anymore. Ran from 2018 to 2020 with 120 Million EUR.

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.

I'm sure we could invest in all of them and money wouldn't be the problem.

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

My man, you're just digging in aren't you?

They can track some specific things, how hard is that to understand? No one said Vad Der Leen is going to track your whereabouts, except you trying to decredibilise the fact that they can track you.

That's it.

I feel it's you dreaming up a world where it would be useful and forcing that idea upon me and then calling me a security freak and paranoid, I did never say they will do it, I just showed you an example where people did.

Forgive me for not covering 100% of this advanced topic in my 3 paragraphs on Lemmy...

Quite obviously the problem is not that you did not write an 560 page essay, but that you were misleading by basically saying "nah, it's fine, nothing could leak, everything is ultra secure nowadays".

If you purposefully steer your car off the road... of course you're going to crash. If you're going to expose non-encrypted things onto the internet...

did you just ignore a whole lot of points here? DNS, SNI? smb clients? whatever else? its not like I'm using HTTP. things are largely encrypted, the rest is out of reach!

Encrypted SNI (ESNI) / Encrypted Client Hello (ECH) exists... Cloudflare for example supports ECH, and they transit a LOT of data.

how many sites exactly support that configuration? do you need additional configuration for that in e.g. nginx? if so, most selfhosters probably don't have it, because it's talked about almost nowhere.

and is it finally enabled by default in firefox? will firefox just retry without encryption when the connection fails?

But once again... would be outside of the scope of discussion here. Yes... an ISP can make an educated guess of where you're likely to be going... and maybe even make a reasonable guess of what you could doing... But certainly not the details of it.

it is certainly in scope. the discussion is not about security and your accounts getting hacked by evil EU, but privacy and data mining, for which all of these is a treasure trove.

And this all ignores the fact that a random coffee shop isn't going to do full packet inspection to get this data to begin with. It's not worth it for them.

probably not the coffee shop but the networking equipment, where even cheaper models include some form of "smart cloud security"

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.

Sure, if you're just trying to say that they can technically do something you're right. I just thought that we're discussing if it's safe to use this service or not. The fact that they can technically track you is inconsequential to the security here but you're right, they can do it.

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)

Who are you?

Most people are better off buying a lightly-used Mac (or not, it's been a while since people have been happy with Apple) or replacing their laptop with a Fairphone or Graphene OS phone than switching to Linux from Windows 10.

I don't really see the connection there with somebody bringing down their own firewall, hosting open services, and basically putting out the welcome mat. You can burn yourself on any OS (and if you can't, I don't want to be using or pushing it).

Best option is to just go to places where the wifi service is affordable but not free so that the operator needs to keep tabs on whether users are doing something other than browsing the internet or playing games

What place charges little enough for the WiFi to be affordable but has somebody live monitoring network traffic?

You're telling me Internet Cafes can't exist? Yes, they're not available, but they should be. And supporting industry of small business IT Security providers still do business with motels and hotels.

Maybe increase the standards of service requirements, but if not? Yeah, we need to find a way to make free WiFi that doesn't demand you trust the operator will monitor for malicious users, instead of limiting safe internet access to our own homes at best.

Internet cafes, at least in my experience, provide you computers. They don't sell you WiFi access. And I very much doubt they have somebody monitoring network traffic live.

If you're saying they COULD exist, I doubt they're financially viable.