this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2025
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European Commission has a "Wifi4EU" initative, provides 93k high-speed private access points across the EU, free of charge. (slrpnk.net)
submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) by Sunny@slrpnk.net to c/technology@lemmy.world
153 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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)

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[–] hmmm@sh.itjust.works 5 points 3 hours ago

I want to be European so bad.

[–] davidagain@lemmy.world 17 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Leaving the EU is one of the stupidest self harming things we ever did.

[–] Jackhammer_Joe@lemmy.world 3 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Who are you?

[–] 46_and_2@lemmy.world 9 points 3 hours ago

UK if I have to guess.

[–] Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de 54 points 19 hours ago (3 children)

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

[–] interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 1 hour ago

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

[–] AlsaValderaan@lemmy.blahaj.zone 17 points 13 hours ago

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.

[–] Sunny@slrpnk.net 12 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] viking@infosec.pub 6 points 11 hours ago

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.

[–] PieMePlenty@lemmy.world 20 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

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..

[–] themurphy@lemmy.ml 7 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] possumparty@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 13 hours ago

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.

[–] Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de 31 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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...

[–] iglou@programming.dev 10 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (3 children)

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.

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[–] Baleine@jlai.lu 18 points 1 day ago

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

[–] ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 29 points 1 day ago (8 children)

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.

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[–] biotin7@sopuli.xyz 6 points 21 hours ago (5 children)

But why an App & not a PWA ?

[–] Sunny@slrpnk.net 4 points 17 hours ago

Would have been nice indeed, however there is a web version: https://wifi4eu.ec.europa.eu/#/list-accesspoints

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[–] hisao@ani.social 104 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (12 children)

It's mind-blowing how at the same time some EU government guys pushing stuff like DSA while other do something like this (which is nice, and a complete opposite, if it's not honeypot anyways).

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