Amazon Sidewalk
amazon.com
amazon.com
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."
So far, these annoyances have been tolerable but really shouldn't exist at all with a $1,000 appliance.
It is no longer enough to simply never connect the TV yourself unless you live on a farm without neighbors. You have to crack it open and physically disconnect the WiFi antenna to achieve the desired result. Hell, TV manufacturers will probably switch to 5G Cell antennas soon if they haven’t started to already.
Is there a source for this? I've seen similar hearsay (eg. smart TVs connecting to open hotspots), I couldn't find a reliable source backing it up. The smart TV claim for instance, was traced back to a post on /r/privacy, for instance.
My parents insisted on a Xiaomi TV because it's much cheaper, so we agreed on just not connecting it to the internet. I set up a one-off personal hotspot to update it (in case they fixed bugs in the ISP or such), then killed the hotspot. With them it's more of a (irrational?) suspicion in Xiaomi rather than anything proven, e.g.: I wouldn't dare touch Samsung until they stop selling what are essentially data-harvesting ad displays.
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.
It'd be nice if it were not in the control of any corporation.
How can we make that happen?
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.
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.
I've got a drawer full of unused echos, chromecasts, etc. I haven't had a prime subscription for over 2 years now because every time I order something its a 50/50 that I will get a shitty ripoff from China. I am desperately looking to get off of their cloud offerings too.
I wish more would recognize the convenience of Amazon for the dystopia that it truly is and then act with their wallets. Shopping at 3 different online retailers vs 1 isn't that much of an added inconvenience, and I personally find that when you order direct from the manufacturer (when possible) that your success rate on getting high quality, non-fake stuff nears 100%. AWS is a harder sell because of how wide the feature set is, but there are options for any scale.
This isn't even scratching the surface on how they treat many of their employees. Who is working in an amazon warehouse right now and actually having a good time of it? Amazon could easily automate away many jobs they never wanted in the first place, but sacrificing lower-skilled humans do the last mile of messy pick & place turns out to be more friendly to margins.
> I haven't had a prime subscription for over 2 years now because every time I order something its a 50/50 that I will get a shitty ripoff from China.
Were you ordering expensive sneakers and purses regularly? You'd think if this was the experience of even a minor fraction of their customers (beyond the HN commenters who claim this is wide spread in every Amazon topic), they wouldn't be breaking record sales every quarter.
> This isn't even scratching the surface on how they treat many of their employees. Who is working in an amazon warehouse right now and actually having a good time of it?
Who is doing manual labor of any form and having a good time of it? Amazon to their credit gave a minimum wage of 15 USD to these workers, often ahead of the states they're located in, and the workers get full health care and benefits. I'm not saying they can't be paid more or shouldn't be paid more, but I'm going to acknowledge their agency. Over 800k of them picked Amazon over say Walmart or Costco or some other warehouse job.
> Amazon could easily automate away many jobs they never wanted in the first place, but sacrificing lower-skilled humans do the last mile of messy pick & place turns out to be more friendly to margins.
Companies hire people to do work if it's profitable is the essence of this objection? There are complex systems that lead people to accepting these jobs -- America's failing education system, the lack of upward mobility and opportunity for many citizens, lack of focus on trade / manufacturing jobs in school, etc.. You take the easy route of blaming a corporation doing corporation things.
> Were you ordering expensive sneakers and purses regularly? You'd think if this was the experience of even a minor fraction of their customers (beyond the HN commenters who claim this is wide spread in every Amazon topic), they wouldn't be breaking record sales every quarter.
Come on, you know as well as I that there is not necessarily a correlation there: between record quarter sales and counterfeit products. I agree that claims of 50% counterfeit products is an exaggeration but to point to their quarterly sales is as refutation is silly.
Sales could be increasing for any number of reasons unrelated to customer satisfaction. Cusatomers could be unaware they are purchasing counterfeit products, etc.
I take your point.
That said, many (or even most?) people enjoy doing some amount of physical work. However, Taylorism and the industrial revolution tended to make physical work so repetitive that it become unsatisfying.
For example, in my experience, UPS drivers often like a job where they get to be outside and active. I don't have surveys at hand, but I would guess that skilled laborers like the work itself. Their bosses, sick time, injuries, probably not so much.
I would ask everyone to think about future scenarios where work can have more physical aspects -- there are advantages to long term happiness and productivity that I think get overlooked.
At this point I already have so many devices in my house it won't matter if I add more. I gave up my privacy for convince a long time ago. Let me know if you'd like me to take those off your hands. :)
> Shopping at 3 different online retailers vs 1 isn't that much of an added inconvenience
I've tried ordering direct from the manufacturer. It's true that authenticity is higher, but everything else is worse. Do I have to pay shipping? How much will be it? I need to put in my credit card again, will it be safe? Will I get any cash back on my purchase? With Amazon, I already know, shipping is free, my 5% cash back card will be default and is secure. It literally takes me a less than 20 seconds to buy something on Amazon if I already know what I want.
> Who is working in an amazon warehouse right now and actually having a good time of it?
I know one person who works at an Amazon warehouse. She says it's the best job she's ever had. She's extremely grateful to be working right now in a good job with a flexible schedule, because she's a single mom in nursing school. Anecdata of course, she's just one person. But in my sample set of 1, there is 100% satisfaction.
Be careful though. I have found, like OP, that everything about Amazon has been getting worse over time.
Free shipping? Well, if you forget that your'e paying for Amazon Prime itself. Also, it seems less things I have been buying of late qualify for Amazon Prime. Is it a change in my spending habits or are Prime products as a percentage of all Amazon goods shrinking? I don't know.
As for the 5% cashback credit card — I have the same. But I am increasingly finding that prices at Amazon are not competitive when I look around. Storage bins at Lowes, a good deal more than 5% less than the same product at Amazon. An electric chainsaw, same brand model, more than 5% less at Home Depot than Amazon. I know it's anecdotal (and many other things are the same price when I shop around) but I am beginning to wonder if Amazon is getting their "free shipping" and 5% back in other ways....
Buying things is a pain in the ass. In companies, purchasing is a full time job, trying to negotiate prices and discounts. and on the other hand you have sellers trying to maximize margin.
Buying things from stores used to contain a large amount of going place to place and comparing prices/features. Online it became easier to compare both but I have been finding it harder to find specs and sometimes pricing recently....
If you have control over both the marketplace and information, you have greater control over the transaction.
Nominally, it does not compare, at least for things bought from Amazon. It's 3% in a category of your choice (gas, online shopping, dining, travel, drug stores, or home improvement/furnishings), 2% grocery stores and wholesale clubs, and 1% in everything else.
But those are all multiplied by 1.25, 1.50, or 1.75 if you have balances of at least $20k, $50k, or $100k, respectively, in certain BofA or Merrill Lynch accounts. What matters is the total in all our eligible BofA and Merrill accounts.
Transfer $100k worth of your mutual funds or your IRA to Merrill, pick "online shopping" as your 3% category, and with the multiplier you've got 5.25% cash back at Amazon. And at Newegg. And at online orders at Walmart, Best Buy, and so on. At some stores it counts as online if you order through their website or app for in-store pickup, too.
You can change the category once per calendar month, so if you are planning on a big purchase at, say Home Depot, just buy near the end of the month and switch the category to home improvement/furnishings before buying, and switch back to online when the month rolls over.
So how much would you pay warehouse workers and why do you think warehouse job in Amazon requires so kind of special treatment or salary?
The show The Patriot Act covered this exact sentiment in a good segment on Amazon.
My son got a free Echo and plugged it in in my house. When I saw it I was a little bugged but played around with it before putting it up. Now I fear my reaction will be more like, "Good God son, what have you done?"
Will Sidewalk share around these passwords? Will Amazon share them with authorized third parties eventually?
https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
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.
Alexa products are designed to protect your privacy. They are built with privacy in mind!
The phrasing here is very deliberate and diabolical.
You can't clear you browsing history - you can only "hide your browsing history"
> 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.
> 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.
Especially if it's recorded and stored somewhere for infinite analysis and replay.
This establishes some reasonable privacy expectations with users – I can be reasonably confident that an Amazon speaker in my home is not listening to me all the time, assuming that Amazon or a malicious third-party is not lying to me.
It is possible to accept this set of trade-offs, and yet be unhappy with some other set of potential tradeoffs (like this new feature). This is not an inconsistent position and nor does it mean that a person who doesn't want to use this new feature is dumb.
Do you have the same objection for anybody who carries a smartphone (i.e. literally billions of people worldwide)? They mostly offer the _exact same feature_ – does carrying a smartphone mean that none of those smartphone users are able to object to some privacy rules that they do not like? Obviously that would be ridiculous.
But I, for example, have my Echo configured to automatically delete voice recordings, and to disallow manual review. I'm pretty comfortable with the privacy compromise involved.
Maybe what you're actually driving at is the somewhat more dodgy practices involved around consent. Everybody should criticise Amazon for their processes here. Manual review is probably generally unexpected, and the default option for an Alexa speaker should be recording no data and allowing no manual review, with both features being explicitly opt-in. This is something it would be fair to pressure Amazon to do, if it's not already the case.
But the point is – it's a dumb argument that "anybody who uses one of these devices doesn't get to complain" and I'm bored of it.
Let me see if I understand correctly.
You bought a device from a third-party (Amazon in this case), which intentionally listens to audio in your home and sends that data elsewhere - literally a promoted "feature".
You obviously don't trust said "third-party" with your audio, as shown by you admitting that you toggled a couple checkboxes to delete your voice recordings and disallow manual review.
And you trust that these settings that you clicked on, on a settings page designed by said third-party, actually do what they say they do?
I mean, your trust has some really odd boundaries.
"I trust Amazon! Except not entirely... But I trust them when they give me the option to make them more trustworthy! Kinda..."
OP has a point. It's literally a spy device designed to help you control music and order toilet paper. Cool, yes. But it's still what it is... People have a justifiable reason to not trust anything about these devices and go with the roll-your-own-sollution route. It's nowhere near a "dumb argument".
I'm aware of the level of privacy and control that I want to have of the data I produce, and have set the appropriate settings.
I am reasonably confident that the tools provided to control this do what they say. It's possible that Amazon is lying to me, but I have no immediate reason to think that is the case.
I don't find this odd, counterintuitive, or unusual in any way.
"I trust Amazon! Except not entirely... But I trust them when they give me the option to make them more trustworthy! Kinda..."
More like… "I trust Amazon to do the things that they say they do, and this is the extent to which I am willing to risk my data on that".
It's literally a spy device
No, it's literally not.
People have a justifiable reason to not trust anything about these devices
People are entirely free to make their own decisions about what level of trust they are willing to place on third parties.
It's nowhere near a "dumb argument".
Yes, the argument that anybody who uses one of these devices has then essentially no right to control or complain about the privacy of them is obviously dumb.
Yes, it literally is. It's a remote-accessible listening device, controllable by someone who is not you. By any classical definition, this is a spy device...
> Yes, the argument that anybody who uses one of these devices has then essentially no right to control or complain about the privacy of them is obviously dumb.
Moving goal posts and bordering a straw-man argument by adding the "no right to control" part, but saying it's obviously dumb doesn't make it so and isn't productive conversation.
When you buy third-party hardware running third-party software that you cannot audit yourself, there is implicit risk that the device can do nefarious things. I don't explicitly believe that Amazon is doing anything malicious, but I also don't trust their systems implicitly. One developer with the right access can potentially remote-access any device, anywhere...
I understand this risk, and I believe you do as well, but I also don't go around complaining that this risk exists. This is implicit in purchasing third-party products, which is the underlying point the argument tries to make...
Perhaps I am missing something, but isn't Amazon the second party to this transaction?
Therefore I am currently planning n on getting something like respeaker.
I'm sure there will be no way to break out of the mesh network into the protected wifi network.
What 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.
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.
But everything after "In the future", is super vague. Help find pets etc, looks like it'll try to make a pooled community video set-up and someone can search across all the cameras.
I can't help thinking that eventually "someone" will be able to search across all the cameras even if there isn't a pooled community video set-up.
> Amazon Sidewalk uses Bluetooth, the 900 MHz spectrum and other frequencies
> The maximum bandwidth [...] is 80 Kbps [...] capped at 500 MB [per month]
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.
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?
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.
It's either repeating yourself ad nauseam to get the response you want or this crap.
That's honestly indistinguishable from a Black Mirror scene.
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.
…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?”
We care about your privacy. Your privacy is important to us
>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...
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.
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.
> "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?
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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).
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?