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 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by Sunny@slrpnk.net to c/technology@lemmy.world
170 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 9 points 1 day ago

I want to be European so bad.

[–] davidagain@lemmy.world 27 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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

[–] Jackhammer_Joe@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Who are you?

[–] davidagain@lemmy.world 4 points 16 hours ago

I'm the former prime minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Tony Blair. Who are you?

[–] 46_and_2@lemmy.world 21 points 1 day ago

UK if I have to guess.

[–] Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de 66 points 1 day ago (4 children)

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

[–] HK65@sopuli.xyz 6 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago)

One of their access points has saved my skin twice now in the past 2 months, so I'm happy it exists.

[–] AlsaValderaan@lemmy.blahaj.zone 20 points 1 day 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.

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

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

[–] interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml 2 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

They seem pretty evenly distributed to me ?

[–] Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml 1 points 19 hours ago

Ah ok yes I see what you mean, Poitiers has none and is clearly some big place While "Le Bourg" probably a rich place, has a whole bunch of them

Of course getting the density of Poitiers for all of Europe on 120 million for 3 years is never going to happen on this approach.

Even though 35$/month per hotspot is reasonable. It's just not the right approach. In reality nearly every single building in Europe has an internet connection and wifi routers.

Since there is not really such a thing as "keeping the RF spectrum of wifi to oneself" The logical approach would have been to socially engineer the default that ALL wifi hotspot would offer any random guest, free throttled courtesy internet access. Something that the ISPs have fervently opposed, something industry has made sure would not happen, at least not by accident. Through hardware design and the dissemination of horror stories. A more competent state would have used this money to just massage the existing infrastructure in opening up to their fellow citizens rather than try and build a parallel infrastructure with brute force money.

I hope they get their shit together and strong arm vendors into a more pro-social private infrastructure, since that essentially free at this point for all intents and purposes.

[–] Sunny@slrpnk.net 14 points 1 day 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 7 points 1 day 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 22 points 2 days 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 12 points 1 day 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 6 points 1 day 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.

[–] hisao@ani.social 109 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days 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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[–] Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de 33 points 2 days 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...

[–] Baleine@jlai.lu 18 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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

[–] zlatko@programming.dev 1 points 23 hours ago

So the initiative here is the initiative itself.

[–] iglou@programming.dev 10 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (4 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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[–] LMurch@thelemmy.club 94 points 2 days ago (3 children)

That's cool. Here in the US, we're this close to banning vaccines. *sad trombone sound

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[–] ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 29 points 2 days 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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[–] giacomo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 54 points 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (6 children)

oh dude, they promised to be privacy friendly! maybe I'm just too american to believe in promises.

[–] AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 48 points 2 days ago (27 children)

You don't have to trust them any more than you trust your local Starbucks WiFi. We're at the point where your traffic should no longer be vulnerable just because you're on the wrong WiFi network.

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