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Amazon US customers given one week to opt out of mass wireless sharing

theguardian.com

121–130 of 338 posts

Re: Amazon US customers given one week to opt out of mass wireless sharing

#121
post #120
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they are stealing 500MB of your cap if they aren't compensating you.

As exchange for their otherwise unpaid service from those devices, they're using a fraction of your potentially capped internet if you happen to be in a market with such poor competition and/or poor regulatory environment that your service is capped.

So like 90% of the US?

Re: Amazon US customers given one week to opt out of mass wireless sharing

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give any insight into the solution you’re using to achieve this? I’ve got some noisy gadgets on my network that I want to cordon off, but I’m not sure where to begin.

Dedicated SSID(s) with that/those SSID configured as a guest network goes pretty far. I happen to use Ubiquiti gear, but most any router is likely capable of creating a dedicated guest SSID (or multiple). That covers wireless devices (which is all the IoT stuff that I have). The one aggravation I had was trying to get the Chromecasts to work correctly (where I wanted to be able to cast from a machine on the main LAN…

> I would periodically get it working and then it would periodically break.

wait a second... it worked sometimes? without doing any routing trickery or something?

If you did some trickery maybe the devices sometimes chose to speak ipv6 but could not?

Re: Amazon US customers given one week to opt out of mass wireless sharing

#123
post #3

Does this include echo-capable devices like car entertainment systems?

No. The "Sidewalk Bridge" devices that will share your internet to the Sidewalk are, as of today: > Ring Floodlight Cam (2019), Ring Spotlight Cam Wired (2019), Ring Spotlight Cam Mount (2019), Echo (3rd gen and newer), Echo Dot (3rd gen and newer), Echo Dot for Kids (3rd gen and newer), Echo Dot with Clock (3rd gen and newer), Echo Plus (all generations), Echo Show (all models and generations), Echo Spot, Echo Studi…

This link is also helpful:

https://www.cnet.com/home/smart-home/amazon-sidewalk-will-cr...

It's interesting that only a few devices, mostly the newer ones, are capable of using LoRa. All the older ones are just BLE (i.e. technically <100m range, but in real world conditions probably 10-30m max).

Re: Amazon US customers given one week to opt out of mass wireless sharing

#124

I'd rather go without internet than have one of these damned smart devices in my house. I can't believe how popular they are.

I might be the only one here who doesn't care at all about this. I love my Echo and Amazon IOT devices and have got better things to do than wring my hands over what they're doing with my internet connection. They use hardly any bandwidth so whatever, not going to turn this feature off.

Re: Amazon US customers given one week to opt out of mass wireless sharing

#126

I was worried that my Eero routers were going to get roped into this, but thankfully the CEO confirmed on Reddit[0] that there are currently no plans to involve their products in Sidewalk. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/eero/comments/nnvs20/amazon_sidewal...

No plans... at least until Amazon offers them a big enough bribe.

Re: Amazon US customers given one week to opt out of mass wireless sharing

#127
post #97

Article doesn't mention it, but this is how you opt-out (there are others but this one has screenshots). https://www.tomsguide.com/reference/what-is-amazon-sidewalk Added to my list for the next time I'm on the phone with my parents, for our (weekly at this point) how-to sessions on "stopping the industry I work in from spying on you". I really, really wish product managers would understand the kind of ecosystem they…

Every time this Sidewalk concern style story crops up (which it has several times over the last 6-12 months), I have rechecked that Sidewalk is disabled. So far I have not found it set to anything except for disabled. I hope Amazon isn’t doing a gradual roll out to enable, as if I find it enabled at any point in the future, I am done with Amazon devices in my home. As far as I’m concerned based on Amazon Logistics pe…

I bought my mom an Echo for Christmas last year for the kitchen, since she likes making lists and setting timers for baking and her hands are starting to show their age (she’s 63, ‘bout that time I guess). Really grating that what was at one time a helpful device for older folks is now retroactively being turned into yet another internet surveillance device.

Re: Amazon US customers given one week to opt out of mass wireless sharing

#128
post #83

> Users can disable Sidewalk in the settings section of the Alexa or Ring apps, but have until 8 June to do so. After that, if they have taken no action, the network will be turned on and their devices will become “Sidewalk Bridges”. But the setting will still be available, right?

Yes. It’s a scarier way to say that it’s opt-out.

Re: Amazon US customers given one week to opt out of mass wireless sharing

#129
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the same thing Apple is doing. They want every device to be a part of a low-power BLE network for Apple AirTags or Amazon Echo Tiles or whatever they are. They want a huge network so that these small low power devices can use everyones devices to connect to the internet. For what it's worth, the only way to Opt-Out from Apple's broad network like this is to disable all "Find My" network tracking, so you'll never…

To be honest, I find these ad hoc mobile mesh networks fascinating. With cheap flash, we could do a lot of high-latency high-bandwidth data transport with just existing movements. We could eliminate telecoms overnight but we just don’t have the organization to do it. Like, every house used to have a VHF/UHF receiving tower on it.

There are tons of cellular network antennas hidden atop buildings in regular urban environments. Thankfully, in the current paradigm, telcos pay rent to put down these antennas and occupy the space.

Re: Amazon US customers given one week to opt out of mass wireless sharing

#130
post #7

What will happen is some high profile company that has a few Amazon devices on their network will have these devices exploited to gain network access and get hit with some ransomware/data theft/etc... and then there will be a big legal battle between Amazon and the hacked company and this whole idea will be shut down and consumers will get a $10 class action settlement for each device.

$10? Ha. How about another year of credit monitoring!
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