Amazon Sidewalk Automatically Turned On June 8th!

Reported by Pam Snell, sitting in for David Snell

This has been stewing with David since its activation date was announced on June 1st!

The switch is about to be flipped on Amazon Sidewalk, the tech giant’s vision of smart neighborhoods connected by an array of its echo-enabled gadgets.

Amazon, which originally announced this networking project in September of 2019, plans to make Sidewalk operational on YOUR Echo-enabled devices on June 8.

The low-bandwidth shared network uses a portion of your home Wi-Fi to connect Echo devices, Ring security cameras, smart lights, smart home appliances, smart door locks, and Tile Bluetooth trackers to help everyone’s devices “get connected and stay connected,” according to a description on the company’s website.

This connectivity across neighborhoods could come in handy when, say, your Echo speaker or Ring camera loses its Wi-Fi connection. When that happens, Sidewalk can more easily reconnect your devices to one of your neighbors’ WiFi networks using their WiFi bandwidth. FYI – you won’t know if you’ve connected to them and they won’t know if you’re using your bandwidth and electricity.

And, as Amazon says in the project description, “Sidewalk can also extend the working range for your Sidewalk-enabled devices, such as Ring smart lights, pet locators or smart locks, so they can stay connected and continue to work over longer distances.”

Amazon doesn’t charge anything for Sidewalk and the company says “multiple layers of encryption” provide privacy and security for your personal data. But Amazon has gotten some flak for automatically opting users in. Why OPt In instead of Opt Out?  The reason for this is clear – for network effects to work, you need billions of participants and we learned (also this month) when Apple/Google started asking if they could track your buying habits,  only 4% of people opting in and said yes.

You can use the Alexa app to opt-out, which is David did on the 7th.. He feels strongly about the automatic opt-in and he doesn’t like the idea of being a node on an Amazon peer-to-peer network and allowing anyone outside our home network to use our bandwidth – the service we pay for every month, not Amazon.

First he tried to get Alexa to disable it a couple of different ways but she played dumb. She even offered him the song Sidewalk by Piper Rockelle and the Wikipedia explanation of what a sidewalk is! It wasn’t until June 8th that she admitted to knowing what “Amazon Sidewalk” is.

A decade from now we will look back on today and analyze the “network effects” that were unleashed. Apple recently released AirTags which utilizes over a billion phones to locate any item down to the square inch on the planet (yes, they are circle-shaped keyrings today – wait till Nike starts embedding them in your kids’ shoes).

Now that Amazon has turned on  “Sidewalk,” it will share your internet with neighbors and the street out front. With 250 million Alexa devices sold, this will create a formidable mesh network covering most urban areas. Both of these announcements are opt-out instead of opt-in.

To enable or disable Amazon Sidewalk for your account, use the Alexa app:

1. Open the Alexa app
2. Open More and select Settings
3. Select Account Settings
4. Select Amazon Sidewalk
5. Turn Amazon Sidewalk On or Off for your account

Hey Amazon…… How about a red bar across the top of the Alexa app or maybe a voice prompt the next time you talk to Alexa? Not only is it opt-out, but it also takes 5 steps. If Amazon can configure 1-click ordering, they should be able to configure 1-click Opt-Out.

This does seem like overreach to me. Comcast did this and paved the way with the Xfinity Hotspot functionality on every one of their customers’ routers. They got sued over that, and now 7 years later it’s still in litigation. We tell all our clients to turn this off, (it stays on even if the router is in bridge mode), why should the service they pay for and their electricity be used to provide publicly accessible internet to random people. Not to mention it’s just more wireless interference if the client has their own access points. At business locations, Comcast was even installing additional hardware dedicated to this purpose for a while, although I haven’t seen that lately, maybe that practice was nixed in the lawsuits.

If these companies really want a global Wifi network, let them cut a deal with Elon Musk’s new satellite internet service.

This could be the first steps towards Skynet as the Terminator series defined it and we know how THAT turned out…