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Amazon Sidewalk
- Lorin 6y agoThe email I received states this will be an opt-out feature... knee jerk reaction is mixed. I'll need to review the privacy terms/data use limitations.
- ponker 6y agoDoes that mean my Echo Dot could be providing uplink to yours without my opt in? Jesus.
- andrepd 6y agoYou screwed up when you bought an echo dot.
- m12k 6y agoThere's something ironic about the corporate overlord tricking its consumers into pooling their resources with their community (and probably getting bitten by the data caps that other corporations impose).
- smileybarry 6y agoDon't worry, soon you'll be able to pool the data caps too, so everyone will exceed their caps equally
- cheschire 6y agoWhatever the terms say today, we won't put nearly the amount of effort into reviewing them a year from now when they change them to something worse.
- themaninthedark 6y agoThey are very specific about their plans to change the TOS. >Today, when you share your Bridge’s connection with Sidewalk, total monthly data used by Sidewalk, per account, is capped at 500MB I think the "Today" means that they plan to change the data amount daily...
- andrepd 6y agoYes, I'm sure these words on paper mean a lot. They are completely worthless. They can do whatever they want in their servers and in the devices planted in people's homes, and there's no way of us knowing it. And if by some miracle that does come out, then they will get slapped with half a day revenue in fines (courtesy of bourgeois-captured government), and move on with their lives.
- wombatmobile 6y agoSo, Amazon is doing this because it cares about our local communities and it wants us to have peace of mind?
- kle 6y agoyes, they also care about privacy so they added multiple layers of encryption.
- function_seven 6y agoThose layers... are they military grade?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- DenverCode 6y agoLowest bid confirmed.
- krtkush 6y agoReally tall walls around the data centers.
- toyg 6y agoBuilt by top men. Top. Men.
- ffpip 6y agoAES1024 with RSA2096. Used by the US military and the world's largest banks We care about your privacy. Your privacy is important to us
- allyant 6y agoI really hope this is not a precedence for turning 'privacy' into meaning 'encryption to our data centers'.
- privseek 6y agoTried to opt-out, followed the instructions and no option there... Updated the app, still no opt-out available... Another reason to switch to some offline home brewed smart speaker.
- SirYandi 6y agoFrom the linked article: > Where can I change my Amazon Sidewalk preferences? Available later this year, Ring customers who own an eligible device can choose to update their Amazon Sidewalk preferences anytime from the Control Center in the Ring app or Ring website. Echo customers who own an eligible device can update their Amazon Sidewalk preferences anytime from Settings in the Alexa app. If you have linked your Ring and Amazon accounts, your Sidewalk preferences on either your Alexa or Ring app will apply to all of your eligible Echo and Ring devices.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Semaphor 6y agoThe E-Mail they sent had different wording, only mentioning ring as example for things this works with: > For example, if your device loses its wifi connection, Sidewalk can simplify reconnecting to your router and help set up new Echo devices. Sidewalk can also extend the coverage for Sidewalk-enabled devices, such as Ring smart lights and pet and object trackers, so they can stay connected and continue to work over longer distances. > When enabled, Sidewalk uses a small portion of your Internet bandwidth to provide these services to you and your neighbors. This setting will apply to all of your supported Echo and Ring devices that are linked to your Amazon account. > Sidewalk is coming to your Echo device later this year, but you can disable this feature at any time from the Amazon Alexa app.
- joosters 6y agoIf you've already got an amazon smart speaker listening inside your home, surely this new mesh network is the least of your privacy worries?
- deanCommie 6y agoPrivacy and security whitepaper linked from the FAQ: https://m.media-amazon.com/images/G/01/sidewalk/privacy_security_whitepaper_final.pdf https://m.media-amazon.com/images/G/01/sidewalk/privacy_secu... That earns some trust... Honestly, it would be so cliche if all the top comments about this were Privacy Pearl Clutching from people who didn't take a look at how the protocol actually works or what it's implications might be.
- evgen 6y agoIt is from Amazon, so there is no privacy and security is only there to the extent that it prevents either bad press or someone else blocking the ability of Amazon to exfiltrate as much advertiser-worthy data as it can from your network and anyone who happens to wander into range.
- deanCommie 6y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > "Have curious conversation" Yes, Amazon doesn't care about privacy, Google only kills products, and Facebook is only interested in whatever increases ad click throughs. Now that we got that out of the way, could we actually sometimes have a conversation about some of the technical works that the people at these companies create that might be relevant to the people in this community?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- joosters 6y agoAll the privacy protections are about preventing other users from monitoring the network. Amazon however will know everything, like what devices you have installed, where they are, who they communicate with, what they monitor, etc, etc. They are using the word 'privacy' to mean "we won't tell you what we know"
- Spivak 6y agoPrivacy at these companies always always means "we protect your data from others." No company will ever paint itself as a potentially untrustworthy party.
- CamperBob2 6y agoWhat is Amazon Sidewalk? Amazon Sidewalk is a shared network that helps devices work better. Operated by Amazon at no charge to customers, Sidewalk can help simplify new device setup, extend the low-bandwidth working range of devices, and help devices stay online even if they are outside the range of their home wifi. In the future, Sidewalk will support a range of experiences from using Sidewalk-enabled devices to help find pets or valuables, to smart security and lighting, to diagnostics for appliances and tools. Uh, OK, I still don't know what Amazon Sidewalk is. This language doesn't sound sketchy or evasive at all...
- crooked-v 6y agoIt's a mesh network controlled by Amazon, using Echo devices as nodes and users' home wifi as the backhaul.
- trevyn 6y agoEveryone in the space wanted to do it, Amazon now has enough penetration that it might actually have useful coverage.
- Spivak 6y agoI'm actually surprised that ISPs didn't come together to just build this into their access points.
- webmaven 6y ago> I'm actually surprised that ISPs didn't come together to just build this into their access points. Comcast does something like this (though not technically a mesh) but only for their own customers. If your AP is set to share access, then as a Comcast customer you get a sort of 'roaming' access through any other Comcast AP that is also set to share. As I recall, it was turned on by default and opt-out, but you were on your own so far as actually finding an AP you could mooch off of. Guest access is always prioritized below the owner. Also from memory, which may be faulty, out of date, or both: There is some reasonable limit to the total bandwidth you can use as a guest from sharing APs each month (I think it was maybe something like 50GB), and other customers' guest use of your AP doesn't count toward your own data cap. I also vaguely recall some sort of upsell for your account to remove your data limit as a guest, or at least increase it. I would guess that if other ISPs start offering their customers the same sort of setup, the next step would be peering agreements between them.
- maurys 6y agoFrom what I understand, each of your devices can act as a mini-wifi extender. And that extended WiFi is public (to other Amazon sidewalk devices). And that's useful if you have say, smart outdoor lights which could be out of your Wifi range. And later to use the devices as a sort of pooled resource for things like search-and-rescue in a community? I didn't really get what they are trying here. Apart from the instinctive privacy and big-tech worries (an admittedly big aside), this seems like it could be pretty cool.
- crooked-v 6y agoIf it was Apple or Philips doing it, I might be tentatively optimistic, but I just don't trust Amazon in this area.
- asdfaoeu 6y agoTbf if you that was the case you probably aren't the type of person to install a voice activated microphone from them either.
- SahAssar 6y agoHearing Philips in this context made me think of the Philips Hue worm that theoretically could spread from lightbulb to lightbulb to attack an entire city: https://eyalro.net/project/iotworm.html https://eyalro.net/project/iotworm.html
- Someone 6y ago“And that's useful if you have say, smart outdoor lights which could be out of your Wifi range.” …and inside of that of you neighbor, and your WiFi can reach your neighbor’s WiFi. I have trouble imagining cases where that applies. The first part might apply if you have a large garden, your neighbor a tiny one, and you want lights all over your garden. However, that still wouldn’t help with the “your WiFi can reach your neighbor’s WiFi” part, unless that goes over the internet, via Amazon’s servers (introducing a new point of failure in the process) I think the use case is more “where’s my dog/child/stolen laptop?”
- doctorfoo 6y ago
- theodric 6y agoWow, they invented LoRA, gg
- speedgoose 6y agoHow ironic is it to claim "Designed to protect your privacy" while a picture next to this very specific claim is a surveillance camera ?
- codegladiator 6y agoThe way privacy protection works is first they take your privacy and then try their best to protect it. How can they protect something they don't have ?
- ffpip 6y agoBut they added multiple layers of military grade encryption! Alexa products are designed to protect your privacy. They are built with privacy in mind!
- pilsetnieks 6y agoI think you're too subtle and are being Poe-lawed here.
- ffpip 6y agoThanks. I learnt about Poe's Law today.
- ramboldio 6y agoAlso, "It's all on your own terms" on a amazon website begins to sound like a threat. :D
- cle 6y agoDepending on the specifics of the implementation, and who you trust, it may not be ironic at all. Securing a surveillance camera feed isn't exactly difficult.
- _-___________-_ 6y agoDo not want.
- modeless 6y agoSo you let Amazon use your WiFi to bridge their proprietary IoT network to the internet, potentially lending your bandwidth to anyone near you with an Amazon device. Existing Amazon devices already support it and it will be turned on soon. Is this opt in or opt out? > Amazon Sidewalk uses Bluetooth, the 900 MHz spectrum and other frequencies > The maximum bandwidth [...] is 80 Kbps [...] capped at 500 MB [per month]
- avh02 6y agoopt out
- hyperdimension 6y agoHmm, I wonder if they'll be crediting us for all that data egress at AWS prices...
- Naac 6y ago>> Is this opt in or opt out? That's the frustrating part. It reads like opt-out, but when I go check the settings on the app as per the instructions it looks like it's already disabled. But it says "Coming Soon"? So am I supposed to check the app for the next couple weeks until it's forced turned-on, and then disable it? Definitely not what I would call "Customer Obsession". If anyone knows how to cripple the echo via firewall rules, while still keeping most of its functionality, please let me know.
- m463 6y ago"Customer Obsession" just not in the way expected :) By the way, I called customer service for a company (not amazon), and the first message was "This call will be recorded for quality and training purposes"... And I couldn't help but think "training" might not be what I expect.. could training mean machine learning?
- r00fus 6y agoOh they’re obsessed about you as a customer. Like a stalker.
- cheschire 6y agoGoogle maps allows google to add your location to their knowledge graph in various ways (real time, plans, favorites, etc). It's so well done that it would take a herculean effort to create a competitor map service (see OSM). Amazon can't compete here, I suspect. I'm not a wlan engineer. Can someone smarter tell me if this tech can be used to expand Amazon's location knowledge to track non-user devices more intelligently, i.e. across neighborhoods?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- toyg 6y agoAmazon here is effectively bootstrapping their own global mesh network. Fun and scary in equal measure. I wonder if this was in the original plan for the Echo all along, or just evolved organically. It definitely has potential for being another well-paved road to total-surveillance hell.
- grey-area 6y agoI think a global mesh network is inevitable - every thing is going to talk to the devices around it (and eventually to wired humans) all the time wirelessly. It'd be nice if it were not in the control of any corporation. How can we make that happen?
- the_other 6y agoStop giving Amazon money.
- andrepd 6y agoAlready doing that. Unfortunately it's not so simple. We can't expect The Market to solve everything.
- the_other 6y agoI'm not a free market capitalist, so I'm surprised I"m about to write this... but we should try to get The Market to solve this. If those of us who're privacy conscious stopped paying Amazon money, we could use that money to create/buy privacy-focused alternatives. I'm not talking about Amazon the shop (although that's a good avenue of attack too), I'm talking about AWS. Stop using AWS. Loudly take your money to another cloud supplier. Amazon competes on volume, so remove the volume. Leave them with warehouses of redundant servers until they have to sell them off. And then buy one.
- noncoml 6y agoStop giving Amazon money. Don’t buy stuff from eBay. Don’t use Google, Gmail, Chrome. Don’t give Comcast your business. Don’t use Windows. Avoid Apple and their predatory App Store fees. Don’t buy stuff from Walmart. Don’t give Sony your money. And the list goes on.. You see where I am going? This will never work. David cannot win over Goliath every single time. That’s why we need another giant, the government, to fight for us. But we don’t want the government to interfere with capitalism, do we? We want to have our pie and eat it too.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- pacifika 6y ago>When enabled, Sidewalk uses a small portion of your Internet bandwidth to provide these services to you and your neighbors. > To disable this feature, follow these instructions. Amazon is changing the meaning of "When enabled" from "When enabled by the user" to "When the feature is on" and if I have to be this careful reading their end user copy I have no use for Alexa. Bad form using this dark pattern.
- noneeeed 6y agoI keep reading the description but I'm really struggling to come up with a common use case for this. A number of ISPs in the UK (I think both BT and Sky) used to do something similar (possibly still do), where you would add a special network to your router that was only open to other people who also added the network to theirs, so you could use each others when out and about. It was all tunnelled and secure. It was genuinly useful in the days before 4G mobile and widespread wifi in shops and cafes, I used it a lot. With this I just don't see what devices would be using it. It isn't something you can just piggyback on to check your email. It feels like this is preperation for some new device or service. Or am I underestimating the number of people who want to put an Alexa device somewhere that they don't have a network, but which is close to someone elses network?
- pacifika 6y agoSimplifying adding IoT devices to your network for people who don't normally buy them.
- rkagerer 6y agoI would think this so cool if it were a grassroots project or even a plucky little startup. But seeing a FAANG badge on it makes me fear the ramifications. People will opt-in for convenience, and it'll wind up further entrenching the existing players (which I feel will be bad for users over the long term).
- Lorin 6y agoIt's opt-out, meaning it will be enabled by default.
- zapf 6y agoCrowdsourcing surveillance!
- hnburnsy 6y ago> "Be the first to know If you're a product manufacturer interested in creating devices with Amazon Sidewalk access, click here for more information" Great, now every device I bring into my home can access the internet without my knowledge because neighbors are on Sidewalk. Now we know how smart tvs will secretly report our viewing habits, no 5G needed. Suprised that my smartphone with the Alexa app are not part of the Sidewalk network.
- ctvo 6y agoAmazon has kicked Microsoft off the throne of the worst decisions in typography and website design. It's just so low quality and ugly.
- VectorLock 6y ago"Don’t think you need Amazon Sidewalk? No worries. You can update this anytime from the Ring or Alexa mobile apps." Really makes it sound like this is going to be on by default...
- awakeasleep 6y agoAlso, the fact that you can turn it off an on is a feature that can be dropped from future releases.
- subpixel 6y ago> Don’t think you need Amazon Sidewalk? The phrasing here is very deliberate and diabolical.
- m463 6y agoJust like their website. You can't clear you browsing history - you can only "hide your browsing history"
- gooseus 6y agoSomeone just showed me a chat with Amazon Customer Service where they asked how to disable Sidewalk on an Echo Dot 3rd Gen without using these apps and the customer service rep quit without responding. Curious if that is the official response to that question.
- Aperocky 6y agoProbably communicating with higher ups because official response hasn't been drafted yet.
- gothroach 6y agoI just checked, it's off by default for me currently. Maybe they'll change the default in the near future.
- nmstoker 6y agoIt'll depend on your ISP but I believe arbitrary sharing of internet access is likely to be prohibited under some ToS. I wonder if it will be acceptable in Germany as I understand they do not allow unsecured WiFi either (whether this counts as unsecured is what I'd expect it to hinge on)
- Whatty74 6y agoI'm currently on the phone with Amazon because I'm trying to figure out how to turn sidewalk off. the menu doesn't actually appear. it's on by default and there's no way to turn it off even with the most up-to-date version of the app. Amazon seems incredulous and doesn't seem to believe me but that setting doesn't exist in version 2.2372932.0 of the Alexa app
- orev 6y agoBy allowing Alexa into your house to begin with you already capitulated to Amazon’s surveillance. The best and right thing to do is to disconnect and throw them all in the garbage. I really don’t understand how anyone with any IT experience at all ever allowed these constantly recording listening devices into their houses to begin with.
- iandanforth 6y agoSo all I need to do is walk by a building where an Amazon device lives to be granted limited access to a device on an otherwise secure network? I'm sure there will be no way to break out of the mesh network into the protected wifi network.
- aero142 6y agoI don't think that is the intent. I believe the want a separate bluetooth network that can use the private network to access the public internet. I don't think the intent is to have the Sidewalk network ever route to the private home network. I don't trust the implementation, but that seems to be the intent and use case.
- naetius 6y agoNo. No. And no.
- chrisjarvis 6y agolike many things created by Amazon, for me I would categorize this as "technologically very cool but I have no interest in being a part of it or putting this is in my home"
- freedomben 6y agoI just got done buying a new TV. I badly wanted (and would have paid more for) a dumb TV, but couldn't find any. So I bought a smart TV and will simply never connect it to the internet. But ... my new TV is Alexa enabled. I guess that means that no matter how hard I work to keep the damn thing offline, if my neighbor has an Echo, my TV will exfiltrate it's data on me completely circumventing my own network. I try not to be a luddite, but good grief this is starting to feel like a sci-fi horror movie. Pretty soon we'll have to wrap our houses in a Faraday cage in hopes of maintaining some privacy. That or be excluded from modern conveniences like "television."
- thecopy 6y agoI have a new Samsung smart TV and i bought an AppleTV and connected that. Works great.
- brewdad 6y agoMy new Sony smart TV functions "fine" without an internet connection. I use a Shield TV for streaming. It does however pop-up an overlay once a day reminding me to connect to the internet. It also crashes on startup about half the time, presumably because it's failing to connect to a server somewhere. So far, these annoyances have been tolerable but really shouldn't exist at all with a $1,000 appliance.
- smileybarry 6y agoIt boggles the mind that we somehow reached this acceptable state of a crashing TV. If a PC monitor crashed, it's either a RMA or a 2/10 review, why is it okay for a TV to do that?
- kritiko 6y agoIt's an edge case. For 99% of users, it will be connected to the internet and that connectivity was a reason for purchasing.
- banana_giraffe 6y agoI have a couple of Echos in my house. I'm not happy with them, but my SO likes them, and to them, the security trade off is worth it. The other day it suggested I can order bows and wrapping paper in response to a request to turn on lights. Between that and Amazon deciding my bandwidth is theirs for the taking, I think it's time for this garbage to go.
- titanomachy 6y agoDamn that's gross. When I asked my Android Auto for a weather report it gave me the weather and then said something like "by the way, I can read you the news: just say 'hey google, what's the news?'" That annoyed me as well, but at least it wasn't trying to sell me something. I also understand that feature discovery is extremely hard on these voice interfaces, so I'm willing to let the Google thing slide as long as it doesn't do it too often.
- dhagz 6y agoI love that companies think this is the answer to the discoverability problem of voice commands. It's either repeating yourself ad nauseam to get the response you want or this crap.
- smileybarry 6y ago> The other day it suggested I can order bows and wrapping paper in response to a request to turn on lights. That's honestly indistinguishable from a Black Mirror scene.
- balozi 6y agoI can control my devices. Turn them off/unplug, etc. Now I guess I have to also worry about my neighbors devices monitoring me.
- jasonv 6y agoI'll use this thread to share one of my oft-wished features: all mobile apps should come with an on/off toggle, too. Sure, I can delete the app, but if I think I want it in 2 weeks (say, while travelling), there are a lot of activities I might want to disable for some duration, without deleting or losing the local data.
- titanomachy 6y agoIt's not exactly what you're asking for, but disabling background battery and data use for an app on android makes it pretty hard for the app to do much.
- impassionedrule 6y agoIf you're on Android: root and freeze the app with Titanium Backup
- ogre_codes 6y agoThis is deep in the uncanny valley of creepiness. The idea of a ubiquitous mesh network which we derive common benefits from is pretty cool. The problem is the only people who can deliver this sort of thing are the mega-corps we don't remotely trust. It would be awesome if this were an open source project along the lines of TOR, but it's Amazon... eww.
- peanut_worm 6y agoI don’t see any benefit to the customer on this page
- kostarelo 6y agoWhat’s the actual use case for this? Do people have so much trouble connecting devices at the edges of their properties? And if you had, would you ask from your neighbour to connect the device to their network?