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)
Is this new? If they write this despite recent border checks the analogy has not the intended meaning.
Vpns don’t hide mac addresses from phones that pass the access points.
That tracking is done in a much more effective and capillary way by tracking cell towers. I think MAC tracking is a much better option, assuming there are enough of these APs to track.
Pretty much every phone can use random MAC addresses, so you can’t be tracked that way. Obviously there’s a ton of other ways to achieve that, like via that app.