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What a fantastic opportunity for Amazon to divert the conversation away from the other glaring no-no's concerning this concept. For instance, absolutely nobody

What a fantastic opportunity for Amazon to divert the conversation away from the other glaring no-no's concerning this concept. For instance, absolutely nobody has every said "I want to share my internet connection with my strangers". Don't you US folks have fairly strict data caps on your home connections also? I would imagine despite Amazon making all assurances that they apply data minimization and other principles to consume as little as possible, this would be a psychological barrier that cannot be punctured through.

didibus 6y ago
You can opt out.
- qz2 6y ago
  Opting out is never a good solution. Opting in is.
  - didibus 6y ago
    I'd say generally I'd agree, but in this case I think opt-out is good, because it really requires a kind of universal momentum to get going, as the entire feature is only useful if there's mass adoption.
    - waihtis 6y ago
      Why does an individual customer care about Amazon gaining mass adoption? What use cases does this exactly help the user with? Why would I ever have an Amazon device operating outside the field of my home WiFi network?
      - didibus 6y ago
        Well, honestly I don't know, and I'm not sure they know either. I think it might be a kind of chicken and egg. No point in thinking of products that would leverage having internet access outside your home coverage if there's no way for them to do so. But once there's a grid of outdoor internet to be used, maybe there'll be many cool products I can't think of that get released. I think this is quite experimental in that sense. For now, they seem to say it could be used to find a lost dog or cat that would have a sidecar enabled collar. Or it could be used for controlling outdoor smart lights. Or to be able to check on your outdoor appliances, like say, how much gaz left in your lawnmower, etc. Things like that. It caps the amount of data it can use in a month from your WiFi to 500MB and caps the bandwidth to 80Kbs. Also, the neighbor thing is probably exaggerated. Basically, if you want say outdoor smart lights and your WiFi doesn't reach. You can use existing Amazon devices as an extender, like an Echo or a Ring camera. It'll use low frequency signals to extend it to the furthest possible (though limiting how fast it can go). The only thing is, this extended network won't be something you can set a password too and all that. Instead it'll form a mesh with like all other extended sidecar bridges. So those of your neighbors included.
        waihtis 6y ago
        With the caveat that corporate surveillance is not my specialty, I think it is quite naive to assume Amazon has no plan or idea how this will play into their revenue machine over time. Just as a precedent that I know of, things like this [1] popped into mind instantly. We see this pattern over and over again where tech company XYZ introduces some feature with an motive that appears innocuous but that contains the capacity to slide down the slope into full-blown corporate surveillance. I bet in two or three years' time HN's front page will have a blog post from some security researcher on how Sidewalk collects all this extra data to profile you. [1] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/linkuk-bt-google-free-wifi-and-calls-london https://www.wired.co.uk/article/linkuk-bt-google-free-wifi-a...
        didibus 6y ago
        It could definitely be used to track you around. But I don't think it be any more effective than just what phones already provide for tracking you. That said, it might be able to also track your pets, and your car, and other appliances you own.
- waihtis 6y ago
  This being opt-out is one of those big glaring no-no's.
docdeek 6y ago
> For instance, absolutely nobody has every said "I want to share my internet connection with my strangers". I imagine that my experience in France is a little different to the US (no caps on home internet) but I share my home WiFi with strangers as I am incentivized to do so by the ISP. The ISP is also a cell phone service provider (I use them for both) and if you agree to share your home WiFi with their other customers, you get access to those other people sharing their home WiFi, too. It basically means that for the 'cost' of sharing a part of my home internet with a passing stranger, I can get a WiFi connection in most any built up area from someone else sharing. As the person using my WiFi also has to be a customer of the ISP for WiFi and sharing it, too, the only sharing use case is when you are looking for something faster than 4G on your cell phone and you connect securely to a fellow ISP customer's WiFi.
- waihtis 6y ago
  See, here there's a clear win-win with assumedly opt-in. I can see neither in the Amazon scenario.

didibus 6y ago

You can opt out.

qz2 6y ago
Opting out is never a good solution. Opting in is.
- didibus 6y ago
  I'd say generally I'd agree, but in this case I think opt-out is good, because it really requires a kind of universal momentum to get going, as the entire feature is only useful if there's mass adoption.
  - waihtis 6y ago
    Why does an individual customer care about Amazon gaining mass adoption? What use cases does this exactly help the user with? Why would I ever have an Amazon device operating outside the field of my home WiFi network?
    - didibus 6y ago
      Well, honestly I don't know, and I'm not sure they know either. I think it might be a kind of chicken and egg. No point in thinking of products that would leverage having internet access outside your home coverage if there's no way for them to do so. But once there's a grid of outdoor internet to be used, maybe there'll be many cool products I can't think of that get released. I think this is quite experimental in that sense. For now, they seem to say it could be used to find a lost dog or cat that would have a sidecar enabled collar. Or it could be used for controlling outdoor smart lights. Or to be able to check on your outdoor appliances, like say, how much gaz left in your lawnmower, etc. Things like that. It caps the amount of data it can use in a month from your WiFi to 500MB and caps the bandwidth to 80Kbs. Also, the neighbor thing is probably exaggerated. Basically, if you want say outdoor smart lights and your WiFi doesn't reach. You can use existing Amazon devices as an extender, like an Echo or a Ring camera. It'll use low frequency signals to extend it to the furthest possible (though limiting how fast it can go). The only thing is, this extended network won't be something you can set a password too and all that. Instead it'll form a mesh with like all other extended sidecar bridges. So those of your neighbors included.
      - waihtis 6y ago
        With the caveat that corporate surveillance is not my specialty, I think it is quite naive to assume Amazon has no plan or idea how this will play into their revenue machine over time. Just as a precedent that I know of, things like this [1] popped into mind instantly. We see this pattern over and over again where tech company XYZ introduces some feature with an motive that appears innocuous but that contains the capacity to slide down the slope into full-blown corporate surveillance. I bet in two or three years' time HN's front page will have a blog post from some security researcher on how Sidewalk collects all this extra data to profile you. [1] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/linkuk-bt-google-free-wifi-and-calls-london https://www.wired.co.uk/article/linkuk-bt-google-free-wifi-a...
        didibus 6y ago
        It could definitely be used to track you around. But I don't think it be any more effective than just what phones already provide for tracking you. That said, it might be able to also track your pets, and your car, and other appliances you own.
waihtis 6y ago
This being opt-out is one of those big glaring no-no's.

docdeek 6y ago

> For instance, absolutely nobody has every said "I want to share my internet connection with my strangers". I imagine that my experience in France is a little different to the US (no caps on home internet) but I share my home WiFi with strangers as I am incentivized to do so by the ISP. The ISP is also a cell phone service provider (I use them for both) and if you agree to share your home WiFi with their other customers, you get access to those other people sharing their home WiFi, too. It basically means that for the 'cost' of sharing a part of my home internet with a passing stranger, I can get a WiFi connection in most any built up area from someone else sharing. As the person using my WiFi also has to be a customer of the ISP for WiFi and sharing it, too, the only sharing use case is when you are looking for something faster than 4G on your cell phone and you connect securely to a fellow ISP customer's WiFi.

waihtis 6y ago
See, here there's a clear win-win with assumedly opt-in. I can see neither in the Amazon scenario.