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.

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.

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.