More on Amazon Sidewalk

This continues to generate controversy, here from CNet and ACM:

Amazon Sidewalk: What to know before sharing your home's bandwidth

By CNet  June 9, 2021

June 8 marked the launch of Amazon Sidewalk, a new feature that promises to keep your home devices better connected, especially around the edges of your property. The gist is that select Amazon Echo smart speakers and Ring gadgets will serve as bridges capable of connecting with other Sidewalk-enabled devices at long range using wireless Bluetooth LE or 900MHz LoRa signals -- plus a small fraction of your home network's bandwidth. By doing so, these products will become part of a sort of mesh network, with your Echo or Ring device acting as a middleman between your router and, say, those smart lights in the backyard that sit right at the edge of Wi-Fi range.

But Sidewalk isn't just for your outdoor lights and other smart home devices: It's for everybody's gadgets. If your neighbor uses a Sidewalk-enabled mailbox sensor that's in range of the Sidewalk bridges in your home, that sensor may very well use your network to connect to the cloud.

Complete article.  I plan to test out some of the capabilities and security promised.

Amazon and their Sidewalk Experiment

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   .... 

Amazon Smart Neighborhoods to Emerge

 I know this has created some stir about privacy and invasiveness,  but it seems most of the privacy gurus that have taken a closer look are seeing it as benign.  Course, like their current means of easily sharing photos with police, some will see misuse of the resulting data as an issue.   The particular use of wifi and radio signals is certainly novel, will have to wait to see if that can be hacked and misused.   Will experiment and follow. Like their experimental directions. 

Amazon Sidewalk will create entire smart neighborhoods. Here's what you should know in Cnet:

Launching June 8 on Echo speakers, Ring products, Tile trackers and more, Amazon's low-bandwidth internet-of-things network lets your smart home stretch beyond Wi-Fi range.

Amazon has had its sights set on the smart home ever since Alexa came along -- but now the online megaretailer is thinking bigger, and envisioning entire smart neighborhoods. First announced in 2019, the effort is called Amazon Sidewalk, and it uses a small fraction of your home's Wi-Fi bandwidth to pass wireless low-energy Bluetooth and 900MHz radio signals between compatible devices across far greater distances than Wi-Fi is capable of on its own -- in some cases, as far as half a mile, Amazon says.  ... " 

(This article takes a fairly  deep look at the Sidewalk idea, and how it uses current Amazon devices, one concern is that it is now defaulting to op-in. )

Amazon Wants Smart Neighborhoods

Amazon has received much hammering of late on their smart home capabilities. Giving openings to hackers, listening in on private conversations  and through its neighborhoods, overpolicing the streets.  Now they are giving indications that still want to move forward to make people safer.   I will be involved,  Why not?

Amazon Sidewalk will create entire smart neighborhoods. Here's what you should know

Launching soon via Echo speakers and all sorts of other devices, Amazon's low-bandwidth IoT network lets your smart home stretch beyond Wi-Fi range.  .. '

Ry Crist in CNet