The Amazon Sidewalk
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Have you opted-out yet?
Last week, Amazon said it would turn on Sidewalk, its mesh network that uses Bluetooth and 900MHz radio signals to communicate between devices, on June 8. I imagine that most people, even those who bought an Echo smart speaker in the past few years, have no idea what Sidewalk is.
I suspect most of those people would be even more surprised to know that it's turned on by default on every one of their devices. I'll get to that part in just a minute.
First, let's talk about Sidewalk. The idea behind is actually really smart--make it possible for smart home devices to serve as a sort of bridge between your WiFi connection and one another. That way, if your Ring doorbell, for example, isn't located close to your WiFi router, but it happens to near an Echo Dot, it can use Sidewalk to stay connected.
The same is true if your internet connection is down. Your smart devices can connect to other smart devices, even if they aren't in your home. The big news on this front is that Tile is joining the Sidewalk network on June 14. That means that if you lose a Tile tracker, it can connect to any of the millions of Echo or Ring devices in your neighborhood and send its location back to you.
That's definitely a nice benefit, but it's also where things get a little murky from a privacy standpoint. That's because other people's devices, like your neighbor's, can also connect to your network.
Amazon is pretty clear that Sidewalk uses three layers of encryption so that no data is shared between say, someone's Tile tracker and your network. The signal from the Tile is encrypted all the way back to the Tile app on your iPhone or Android smartphone.
Still, a feature like this seems like the type of thing you'd want some control over. If suddenly my devices are going to start connecting to my neighbor's WiFi, or theirs to mine, it seems like you'd have to opt-in, right?
Nope.
That's because Amazon has enabled Sidewalk on every capable device by default. Whether or not you want your device connecting to other devices, or want your neighbors connecting to your WiFi, Amazon went ahead and made Sidewalk opt-out.>
Amazon doesn't make it easy, but if you have the Alexa app, you can tap on the More tab at the bottom, then select Settings > Account Settings > Amazon Sidewalk. You'll see that it's set to "Enabled." Just tap the toggle and you can disable Sidewalk for all of the devices on your account. -
Footage from a test run when they turned it on.
Link to video -
I love that scene. Puts Quentin Tarantino to shame.
Now, back at the original thread subject...no, no, a thousand times no. I will never have a device that can buy things based on what it thinks I said or records my conversations automatically. Ask Nixon.
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Won't be the first time "Big Tech" turning stuff on for you without your consent. Not long ago Comcast got quite a bit of bad press turning on an additional Wi-Fi hotspot (SSID) that lets guests and other Comcast customers get online through the Comcast-supplied Wi-Fi router installed in your home. If you look at Apple's AirTag product, it also uses all the U1 chips in all the iOS/iPadOS, HomePod, maybe even AppleTV devices to pick up AirTag signals and transmit AirTag information to Apple's cloud/servers, including those of AirTags belonging to other people.
