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Exactly this.

The only reason public Wi-Fi is a thing in this day and age is marketing & advertising tracking. Venues don't deploy it out of the goodness of their hearts, they do so because the data they collect from it exceeds the cost of deploying and operating it.

Another issue is that most public Wi-Fi is provided by a few companies offering it "as a service" to the venue so these companies can track you across different venues by your MAC address.

Trading off mobile data for public Wi-Fi for "privacy" is stupid and counter-productive. You're trading off a company that might occasionally be nasty (depends on the region - carriers selling granular location data like in the US wouldn't fly in Europe for example) to companies whose entire businesses is to be nasty.



The reason cafes offer wifi is that otherwise people would stop coming.


[citation needed]

When was the last time you chose your coffee shop based on whether the WiFi was offered?


When my homework assignment required internet for research and the coffee shop was my choice for studying.


Yesterday.


Every coffee shop doesn't have wifi apparently. I wouldn't go to a coffee shop without wifi.




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