Amazon's Sidewalk Network Is Turned on by Default. Here's How to Turn It Off
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> To be fair, there's a good reason it did. A mesh network of devices requires, well, a mesh. That means Amazon needs as many devices as possible to have the feature turned on. If it required you to enable it on your own, Amazon knows that almost no one would.
So Amazon's business reasons are "good reasons", but my privacy/bandwidth/etc. reasons are secondary at best. This sums up the relationship between companies and their customers in the modern tech industry: You take what we'll give you, and you'll like it. At some point we're going to have to come up with a concept like "informed consent" for these things.
The inherent flexibility/relativity of prices seems to be making it too easy for businesses to scam the customers in general. "Ad subsidizing", "razor-and-blades" model, fake paybacks... is there even a way to ensure that a business that pays you something with one hand, doesn't try to take it back with the other one?
Hold tighter when they try to take it back.
No there is no way to ensure that businesses don't try to maximize profits. Its the same reason you want the thing of value for lowest cost.
Certainly asking for permission and paying for it if permission granted, for a start.
Imagine in the physical world if some company decided they need water for their own benefit, so they'll take it by filling buckets from everyones front lawn hoses. That is unambiguously called theft.
There shouldn't be any gray area in the electronic world where theft of bandwidth by amazon could be considered anything other than what it is.
For a more limited use case (for now), Apple is a competitor too with their "find my..." network as well.
I'm hoping for an open alternative to show up as well.
That would make adoption much harder, though – a lot more people have just an Echo device than an Echo device and a Tile.
I'm constantly surprised people let this stuff into their house. IMO modern tech companies are the best argument that a "software market" will never make sense because users not only seem incapable of shopping for software but will often choose the worst option.
I live in the PNW, and avid reader of GeekWire. They wrote a piece in December of 2020 about this issue and the forced Opt In scenario with Sidewalk and Comcast for those curious: https://www.geekwire.com/2020/amazon-sidewalk-rollout-shows-...
(Sorry, mods, for the unrelated thread. It's just so weird.)
Apple of course wants to sell you all the things, but they put privacy first, at least publicly, and don’t collect this information in order to do so.
How much is perception vs. reality? Not sure. But it doesn’t really matter.
It also does much, much less than Sidewalk.
Of course that isn’t much of a distinction since the vast majority of iPhone users will have Find My Phone turned on and I believe are encouraged to turn Find My Phone on during device setup.
Retrieval of the data from Apple requires an iCloud account and the keys required to decrypt it is stored in the key storage of your iDevices.
By my knowledge it seems to be theoretically possible to use the network with no iDevice and a bunch of faking, but I think it hasn’t been done so far.
For work around the network you may be interested in OpenHaystack (custom trackers and client, https://github.com/seemoo-lab/openhaystack) and Send My (custom messages over the network utilizing OpenHaystack, https://github.com/positive-security/send-my).
I'm expecting both systems transmit well under 50 MB/month. They use fundamentally alike premises. Find My also literally takes over a slice of your wifi & share info on gobs of devices it sees. That there is less user interaction with Find My does not make me- like it seems to make you- feel much better about the situation. But it also ought be a relatively negligible amount of throughput
Alas, as usual, these cloud-run devices seem to offer no visibility, no way to see or understand what devices we "own" are doing, gives us no grasp on how they are behaving.
There isn't a qualitative difference between the two in my view (there might be a quantitative one – Sidewalk's data cap is 80 kbit/s or 500 MB per month; Apple isn't publishing this data, but I'd expect it to be lower, although not limited to wi-fi and also using battery power).
The maximum bandwidth of a Sidewalk Bridge to the Sidewalk server is 80Kbps, which is about 1/40th of the bandwidth used to stream a typical high definition video. Today, when you share your Bridge’s connection with Sidewalk, total monthly data used by Sidewalk, per account, is capped at 500MB, which is equivalent to streaming about 10 minutes of high definition video
It honestly just strikes me as one gets way more favorable press coverage and everyone is swayed.
This is really an excellent marketing strategy. Ask anyone and they'll tell you that Facebook is trying to sell your data and Apple is a privacy-focused company.
- As far as I can tell, Apple still has extensive analytics about App Store usage, iOS usage. Google does too, but they aren't pretending Android is private, just private from anybody not called Google.
- That data is considered "first party" so Apple gets a massive exception when it comes to running targeted advertisements. iAd 2 could be just round the corner, and after crippling AdMob and FB it's highly likely it will be more profitable this time.
- Anything in iCloud (files, photos, text messages, browsing history) is accessible to law enforcement. Apple China keeps their encryption keys on the mainland.
Shit, this is a thread about Amazon and Apple are still getting flack somehow.
Is anyone else as creeped out that John Brennan is on the board?
I think I remember that Comcast, when they have enabled public network on private routers, have created a separate network with separate ID and that supposedly is enough to protect router owners from legal problems.
But here mesh is using the same (single) network all devices use in the household. So if someone will abuse their mesh connected device to download illegal data and traffic will pass through your main network, are you liable for it too?
(Counter to quite some propaganda out there.)
It matters very little how it's designed to work. If it can be abused, it will. Encryption can be broken, protocols can be circumvented. It's why we have physical covers for webcams, because they can and are used by malicious parties, even though it should be possible.
If it is not something people would turn on then perhaps it is not something they need.
This is another case of "ask for forgiveness instead of permission".
A simple hyopthesis applies to the "products and services" of the "tech" industry: If they required a fee, users few to none would pay for them.
The only way to test this hypothesis is to start charging fees.
> 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?
I can already connect to my neighbor's wifi, and they can connect to mine: Our ISP broadcasts a separate "public" SSID, which is routed over a separate IP address and available to all of their customers via a captive portal.
It also has its own bandwidth allotment (unlike Sidewalk, but bandwidth use there is probably very low).
Sidewalk is capped at 80 kbit/s transfer rate and 500 MB/month total transfers.
The respectable device from Brand A you own today will auto-update 2 years from now to one with privacy-invading bloatware. You can’t do anything about it because you would need the security updates which are part of the update.
If you switch to Brand B, then over time they’ll do the same thing while Brand A slowly transitions to the “respectable” company. Rinse and repeat.
If such networks kills the industry of lawyers hunting copyright infringements, I have no problem with that.
Not just copy infringement, but getting around parental filters, too. I can see a myriad of reasons someone might try to use this connection for things they dont want on their own network.
On a technical level, it's not even IP forwarding but rather some heavily tunneled and encrypted protocol stack, and I doubt that it's possible to get the IP of a forwarding Sidewalk device.
This could all be very nice tech, if it wasn't for surveillance ambitions and too curious corporations.
If I were Jeff Bezos, I totally would use it.
(i.e., I don't mind if people use a small amount of my bandwidth if there is no risk to me. I do mind my Samsung smart TV with a mic getting online without me knowing about it, because I don't trust that mic in my living room and assumed not giving it my WiFi password would keep it offline.)
Privacy concerns aside, how is this legal in a world where data caps and limited bandwidth exist?
Don't you remember reading about it in the terms and conditions?
Practical via monitoring network traffic density, and only using a small percentage of that (say, 1%).
For those who prefer a better link: https://archive.is/lqAd2