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Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

Yes.

https://www.macworld.com/article/347243/how-to-opt-out-of-th...

So both are opt out. Which one is worse?

Amazon. Apple’s system doesn’t use much of your bandwidth or have anyone else’s data going through your device (it’s completely anonymous).

Can you please explain how Apple’s Find My is anonymous while Sidewalk is not? As far as I understand, Find My collects device location information through other iPhones and then upload them to Apple’s cloud where it can be viewed by you. Apple states that this is done in a privacy preserving way by using rotating identifiers. In the case of Amazon, they state that all the device information being relayed through your device is encrypted and capped at 80kbps.

I am not sure I understand why one is a concern while the other isn’t.

Sidewalk is carrying all kinds of data from other users. You have absolutely no idea what. It’s a loosely defined system that Amazon controls remotely at their will. The encryption stops you from snooping like any other TLS traffic, but Amazon itself is the receiver on the other end. And it piggybacks on your own internet connection - 80Kbps is a huge amount of data.

Find My identifiers have a single purpose, are useless to anything but the owners device, cannot be used by Apple for tracking, ads or whatever, and id be surprised if the entire payload after a day out is > 8KB total. These look completely different to me.

> You have absolutely no idea what. It’s a loosely defined system that Amazon controls remotely at their will.

s/Amazon/Apple and you've got yourself the Airtag protocol. Obviously Airtags use less bandwidth, but both are proprietary and about equally as evil in my eyes.

We know exactly what goes in an airtag message. It’s very limited. https://positive.security/blog/send-my

The article you just linked is about an exploit that allows you to propagate arbitrary data through the Airtag network, which is the exact opposite of knowing what goes into an Airtag message.

Actually read the article. It’s so bandwidth-limited as to be useless

You are entitled to your feelings of course, but the design of the two systems could not be more different.

afaik it is a relay system so it does have other's data possibly going through. That being said the information being passed is less comprehensive.

So the ethical distinction is just data amount? Both send anonymous data, if you just mean encrypted.

The one that lets my neighbour look up kiddy porn over my connection.

I get the anger about Sidewalk, but this is absolutely not a thing you can do with it.

Sidewalk isn’t a wifi network that people can just connect to, it’s a LoRa radio. A low bandwidth, long range protocol. Devices connecting need to be pre-registered with Amazon, and can only communicate via an endpoint in AWS.

Even if someone somehow created a device for arbitrary web browsing via Sidewall, and put up with the incredibly slow connection speed, combined with strict limits on how much bandwidth can be consumed, all they get is a VPN immediately traceable to their AWS account.

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