Amazon devices will soon automatically share your Internet with neighbors | Ars Technica

How can Amazon appropriate your paid bandwidth for someone else's benefit without asking you to opt in?

Easy enough, they figure that the vast majority of Alexa, Ring, et. al. users lack the knowledge to understand the proposal and won't care. The bandwidth stealing is one thing, but there are even more significant personal information security issues that are even more frightening. This sounds like a hacker's dream and a nightmare for anyone with even a modicum of security awareness. If I had any Amazon devices they would be small pieces in Wednesday's trash.

As this thread is called Yikes! and not Amazon, I was surprised when the Google Nest-mini in our living room was prompted to answer a question by something it heard on the television.

I makes me nervous to think that this tool is eavesdropping on us 24/7, but my wife loves the convenience.

Yikes!, indeed.

It's supposedly encrypted and otherwise protected from side to side, top to bottom, and end to end, but that's only Amazon's opinion.

And there's an opt-out mechanism, but how can it be trusted after the insidious way Sidewalk has been implemented?

Trust Amazon? Me? Not on your life!

I don't even like buying things on their platform, but in many instances their prices are very significantly cheaper than those on eBay.

I've got to talk to my next door neighbor who's got a Ring thing "protecting" his doorway.

Although this involves Google, not Amazon, the title of this thread makes it relevant. Google made it hard for users to keep location data private For better or worse, I do not have a smart phone and don't want one. My dumb phone makes phone calls, and that's all that I want it for.

As they say on all the police procedural shows on television, "Follow the money." The greater part of Google's income is derived from selling the user's data and browsing history so privacy and security are to them an anathema. Every product they produce is on one way or another geared toward collecting your data and other than the data collection element their products are pretty good but all are designed to draw user's into the Google eco-system to enable Google to gather more data about YOU. That alone is enough to make me suspicious of anything Google related and that includes Chrome, Google Maps, Ring, etc. They are not evil, just totally focused on their bottom line to the exclusion of the interests of their users.

On the other hand my iPhone and its companion Apple Watch are, as our kids used to say, the boss of me. They monitor my health and daily activity, warn me when something is not as it should be; suggest I see the doctor, and even call 911 if the condition is critical; tell me when to go to sleep and when to wake up, when to stand, when to take a minute for myself, encourage me to exercise, keep me up to date with the current news, manage my schedule, plan vacations, navigate my car and even help me find it when I forget where I parked. Oh yes, they also handle telephone calls, text messages, video conferences, and emails. I could get by without them, but I would not be as healthy or as well informed and would need a plethora of other gadgets to fill in the gaps. The downside is every year I say, "this phone or this watch does everything I need so I am not going to upgrade it this year." Then at the WWDC in June they announce a new feature and I wind up upgrading. (This year it is rumored to be the ability of the watch to non-invasively monitor blood-sugar readings so I probably will upgrade the watch, but my iPhone 11 Max is still good for another year (but then I haven't seen next weeks keynote yet 🤷‍♂️).

I'm sure Amazon knows as much about me as Google. My shopping history goes back to 2002. And I subscribe to Prime, so they know my viewing/listening preferences, too. I've been reliant on Amazon during lockdown.

I was amazed/shocked when, after returning home from a month-long road trip in 2019, Google sent me a map showing every place I'd spent more than and hour. Now, I don't even shrug. I rely on Google Maps.

My phone (Android) is definitely the boss of me, especially now that you have to scan yourself into every shop/bar/restaurant for track and trace. I get reservations on my phone, tickets on my phone, appointments, NHS/Covid updates... I am fully bought in. I just installed an extension in Firefox called "I don't care about cookies".

No tin foil hat for you then, eh?

According to a recent mailer from DuckDuckGo: “If you own Amazon devices, they'll automatically opt in to Amazon's Sidewalk network starting June 8. This allows your devices to connect to your neighbor's WiFi, and theirs to yours." However, you will be able to turn it off.

I wonder if first time purchasers of devices will be given an option, or if Amazon Sidewalk will be a fait accompli going forward.

The opt-out is gratuitous if you can find out about it it only from the media.

For several reasons, this smells like a class action suit in the making.

Apparently, you can opt out of sidewalk at any time.

June 8th is just the date that you'll be opted in.