this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2025

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752

European Commission has a "Wifi4EU" initative, provides 93k high-speed private access points across the EU, free of charge. (infosec.pub)

submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) by Sunny@slrpnk.net to c/technology@lemmy.world

139 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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[–] davidagain@lemmy.world 7 points 6 hours ago

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

[–] Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de 39 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

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

[–] AlsaValderaan@lemmy.blahaj.zone 12 points 8 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 9 points 13 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 3 points 7 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 17 points 17 hours ago

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..

[–] Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de 30 points 21 hours 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 9 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 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 20 hours ago

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

[–] biotin7@sopuli.xyz 5 points 16 hours ago (2 children)

But why an App & not a PWA ?

[–] Sunny@slrpnk.net 4 points 13 hours ago

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

[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 4 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Why not both?

[–] biotin7@sopuli.xyz 3 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

PWAs are easy to maintain & lightweight

[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 2 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Not saying they aren't, just that a lot of folks will probably search their phone's app store and if they don't see it assume it doesn't exist for their phone.

[–] biotin7@sopuli.xyz 1 points 11 hours ago

Who said PWAs can't be put in an appstore ?

[–] ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 23 points 22 hours 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.

[–] ook@discuss.tchncs.de 7 points 17 hours ago

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.

[–] TheProtagonist@lemmy.world 11 points 20 hours ago

Recently mobile phone operators introduced a “fair use policy”, so it’s not really a”roam like at home” anymore, but data volumes can be limited to a fraction of what you are entitled to in your home country.

This is a point where WiFi might get more important again when traveling.

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