Amazon Sorry for Sidewalk 'Confusion' | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Sorry for Sidewalk 'Confusion'

bbc.com

11 pointspelasaco25 comments

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.

You can opt out.

Opting out is never a good solution. Opting in is.

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.

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?

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.

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-a...

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.

This being opt-out is one of those big glaring no-no's.

> 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.

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

I'm not sure why this erroneous email is newsworthy. The thing that bothers me about sidewalk is that amazon is leveraging their favorable market position to share my internet connection with their devices that belong to other people to add more value to their products under the guise of promoting community safety.

I'd be much more supportive of what could be a very helpful and generous service if they used their position to do something truly altruistic and still have the first mover advantage by making this service an open standard for all device that benefit personal and community safety. Amazon, please open this up.

Sharing with everybody? No, they need incentives for people to install the Amazon Microphones into their homes.

They still need to translate the service to Amazon Pavement.

For just the moment, I sympathize with the person who sent the marketing email out.

I've been there - sent out the wrong email to the wrong group or double fired an email. Worst feeling when it's realized.

Yes, but most people then follow up with a correction or apology.

"We recently began emailing customers with Echo devices registered in the US to give them more information about Amazon Sidewalk," an Amazon spokeswoman said. "This service will only be available in the US when it launches. "We apologise for any confusion."

Not sure if you’re saying they didn’t issue an apology... but they did?

Only USA because 900mhz is available in the US. I think Australia also has it open also. It seems based on Lora.

my interpretation is:

1) from the article: "And UK customers who received Amazon's email have told BBC News this was not the case." - i.e: non-US customers received the email (myself included)

2) "we started emailing devices registered in the US" (which has an untrue scoping, since i have a UK registered device in Berlin, i _may_ have registered it in the US intially, i'm not sure) - to me, this refers _only_ to the original email announcement

and 3) still the spokeswoman talking, but no longer about the contents of the original email and not mentioning a follow up email: "This service will only be available in the US when it launches. We apologise for any confusion."

all in all: The apology has been an article on the BBC via spokeswoman. Not an email to my inbox (yet), where the mistake occurred. so, while yes, they have apologised, it's not in the format you'd expect someone who sent out a mass email incorrectly.

I try to avoid this by writing the email before the recipient addresses. In theory it shouldn't matter but somehow when I want to write an email my brain is more concerned with putting my thoughts into writing and less about thinking who should receive it as I open the compose screen.

I do the same. I also write the body before the subject line... I usually have a much more concise and useful subject when I write that last.

I do the same. In fact, when replying to very important emails I compose the response in a new compose email window and finally paste it back into the reply.

Hah, I do the same... well, I actually use a text editor to compose the new email. But, I like your idea to use a new email window better.

They didn't apologize for forcing an opt-out feature on their users, they apologized to British customers for sending them an email about a service only available in the US.

900mhz got destroyed in California by PG&E in the rural environment, now we get Amazon also entering 900mhz game....

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