Do you have other examples? I am really curious when they said privacy friendly and ended up snooping.

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 I don't remember the last time I had to use public wifi, feels a bit outdated and insecure.

Only the rich can afford to pay per GB

So, if I live in the EU, what's stopping me from cancelling my home plan and making the wifi experience worse for everyone?

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).

Infinite data is not a thing, especially not outside the home country.

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.

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.

Every site uses HTTPS which encrypts your data in transit. Even if they sniff the packets, they would spend literal decades trying to decrypt it.

Just be wary of visiting sites or sending traffic not over HTTPS. Its rare, but it does happen.

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..

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.

Someone runs MongoDB unauthenticated, bound on 0.0.0.0 with production data, on a computer without a VPN, and the problem is the WiFi?

Like I get what you are saying, but this sounds like saying that we should ban speedbumps because imagine there is a guy with a loaded gun pointed at a kid with no safe, finger on the trigger, and high on coke, if the car hits the speedbump the toddler is gone. Yeah, but I would hardly say the speedump is the issue.

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.

Why is it written with USD?

Nothing we can do to prevent that, unless we want to turn all laptops into walled gardens. PEBKAC is not the fault of the WiFi network.

Good for you. What makes you think every country has the same package available?

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 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.

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.

Literal eu law that says they can't charge roaming?

Roaming not but there might not be the same price and package somehwere Else in the EU..