except when not. HTTPS helps with security, but there's privacy leaks all around all kinds of network traffic. apps and services you use, websites you visit (DNS, SNI), when do you do something, like arrive or receive a voip call, ...

HTTPS does not protect against everything. there's many other protocols that apps can use for whatever use case, and even HTTPS traffic leaks lots of information directly or indirectly, like the websites you visit (because of DNS, and TLS SNI)

this is such an oversimplification. 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. these can probably be told apart by DNS requests or active connections, and in the case of communications, messaging and voice calling is obvious to tell apart because of the difference in the volume of data. 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.

then what if you have apps that try to establish connections to services at home. like smb or nfs, https services. your smb/nfs client may leak your credentials, I think even linux does not encrypt smb communication unless you request it in a mount option, and with HTTPS you leak your internal domain names because of TLS SNI.

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.

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?

I want to be European so bad.

I need to have a provider that uses the EE network for coverage reasons, I'm with ecotalk at the moment but I think all EE based networks have a roaming charge. To be honest I didn't know it was even possible to get a SIM contract like this for £1.99.

Who are you?

UK if I have to guess.

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?

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.

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

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.

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)