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)
oh dude, they promised to be privacy friendly! maybe I’m just too american to believe in promises.
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.
I don’t really trust that either
That’s the point, you don’t have to. The system works on the assumption that the AP is untrusted.
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, …
My traffic is not vulnerable, but my device might be.
When you connect to public WiFi, you also share it with others, and maybe someone on that network wants to test out their new hacker skills ?
Maybe not as much of a problem for phones, but that juicy developer laptop running unauthenticated MongoDB with a dump of the production database… yup, that now “mine”.
Ideally all those services should be listening on 127.0.0.1 / ::1, but everybody makes mistakes. Maybe the service comes preconfigured to listen on 0.0.0.0.
Just keep your firewall set to public network and you will most likely be fine.
Anything can be hacked, even on your private home network.
Again, people make mistakes, so they may think the firewall is on, but that one time 3 weeks ago when they were debugging something and they turned off the firewall for it, yeah, we never got around to enabling it again.
Also, my home network is a lot more secure by default than shared public WiFi. At home I have decent control over who and what connects. Sure, people could in theory crack my WiFi password, but the risk of that is low compared to sitting on public WiFi.
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.
I feel like the OP you’re responding to. Explain how I should be comfortable? The idea creeps me out, but I admit I haven’t delved into security for a few years.
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.
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)
You don’t HAVE to be comfortable. But if you use any sort of public WiFi, this is no riskier than any of those networks. They can grab some metadata unless you use a VPN, but likely less than what your ISP already has on you anyway. Basically, there’s no reason this should be putting up any major red flags. We’re past the days when a malicious access point could MitM most connections due to lack of encryption.
That’s why audits exist
The EU is almost just as bad, I know the bar is high compared to the US, but still.
There are tons of things the EU is doing well, dude.
From resisting the technocapitalist rethoric of the US, to standing up against imperial bullies like Russia.
I’m not saying it is perfect, nothing is. But sometimes it feels like the EU is the only reasonable beacon in a sea of corruption.
LOL ‘dude’
The EU just bent over to get fucked by US tarrifs.
They shouldn’t worry about Russia as much as they should about US imperialism that causes all the trouble.
But these sell outs will gladly suffer as good obedient vasals. 🤡
The EU only cares about blocking the private sector from getting their citizen’s data. They actively harm privacy when it’s about government access