Is this a crowdsourced experiment? Are we being forced to participate? A true value to consumers? Dangerous or not? Amazon provides their considerable technical white paper on it, part of it below, and Arstechnica's too. Some people are irked by the fact that the default settings for Amazon settings will turn it on. Amazon's view appears to be that they need to have enough participants to make the test work. Are we all ready? Looking forward to learning more.
Amazon Sidewalk Privacy and Security Whitepaper
Introduction
Amazon Sidewalk is a shared network designed to help customer devices work better, both at home and beyond the front door. Operated by Amazon—with no charge to customers—Sidewalk helps simplify new device setup, extends the working range of low-bandwidth devices, and helps devices stay online, even if they are outside the range of the user’s home wifi.
Customers with a Sidewalk gateway are able to contribute a small portion of their internet bandwidth, which is pooled together to create a network that benefits all Sidewalk-enabled devices in a community. This can include experiences ranging from finding pets or valuables that may be lost and improving reliability for devices like leak sensors or smart lighting, to diagnostics for appliances and power tools. For example, smart lighting at the edge of a user’s property, or a garage door lock in a poor coverage zone, can receive connectivity support from a participating neighbor’s gateway and continue to operate if the device falls offline for a period of time. Similarly, a pet-finder device can leverage Amazon Sidewalk to locate a dog that has left the yard and is out of reach of the user’s personal network. Amazon caps the amount of bandwidth shared to reduce the chances of any degradation in a customer’s home network performance1. Participation in the neighborhood network is optional for all customers.
A simple control is provided to enable and disable participation in the neighborhood network. When customers first turn on a new Sidewalk gateway device, they will be asked whether they want to join the network. For customers with existing devices that are Sidewalk capable, an over-the-air (OTA) update will connect them to the network—no action is needed. These customers will first receive an email about the pending update and instructions for how to disable, if that is their choice.
As a crowdsourced, community benefit, Amazon Sidewalk is only as powerful as the trust our customers place in us to safeguard customer data. To that end, this document outlines the steps we have taken to secure the network and maintain customer privacy. These efforts are core to our mission and will continue to evolve and improve over time.
1 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, total monthly data used by Sidewalk enabled-devices, per customer, is capped at 500MB, which is equivalent to streaming about 10 minutes of high definition video. ... ' ( more at the link above) )
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Amazon devices will soon automatically share your Internet with neighbors
Amazon's experimental wireless mesh networking turns users into guinea pigs.
By Dan Goodin- 5/29/2021, 3:10 PM in ArsTechnica ....
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