Apple effectively did the same thing with AirTags and turning everyone’s iOS device into a listening post for the Find My network, but there’s no uproar there.
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
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 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.
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).
(Sorry, mods, for the unrelated thread. It's just so weird.)