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Comment by jasonaten | Hacker News Reader

There's a very real difference in that Apple's Find My is using Bluetooth LE and pinging a location/identifier string back to iCloud. Sidewalk literally takes over a slice of your Wifi and shares it with devices that aren't even in your home. Your neighbor's Ring cam could be permanently on your WiFi connection without your knowledge or consent. They should at least ask.

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I don't think SideWalk is for high bandwidth audio/video communication. It uses LoRa for communication, which tops out at 27 kbps, and usually no where near that.

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.

In that sense, Find My takes "a slice of your Wifi" (or even mobile data) as well.

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).

and the iPhone's battery

I'm confused how my neighbors devices would be connecting to my secured WiFi network without my knowledge. Is that correct?

Your smart speaker connects to your wifi AP and acts as a node in the Sidewalk mesh network. Your neighbour's Ring device connects to your speaker through Sidewalk and uses it as an exit point. The good thing is that 900 MHz narrowband has a 400 ms on air time limitation.

That’s not true. From Amazon:

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

all these limits could be changed at amazon’s discretion

LoRa isn’t capable of having the kind of bandwidth to support video so no, they can’t

*Amazon Ring. If they don't have to ask to make the mesh in the first place, why will they ask for, use by themselves, permission to use their mesh to further entrench their business and cut out other competitors.

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