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

theguardian.com

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

#321

Post by LorenPechtel »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #267
hermitdev wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Seems like a genuine customer problem. If you want to set up smart lights through your back yard, or a smart sensor at the edge of your driver, they might not have WiFi connectivity to the rest of your house. That sounds like a "you" problem, not a "me" problem. If "you" are setting up smart devices where "you" don't have connectivity, "you" should provide the connectivity, not "me". (Note: I don't have a problem w…

"You can help me, I can help you". My smart lights work where I don't have connectivity, but you do, and your tile tracker works where you don't have connectivity, but I do. It's really quite similar to Apple's Find My network. I just wish this was going to some open collective where everyone could benefit, rather than just Amazon customers...

I think the real value is for the devices that can move, such as that Tile. You have practical way of ensuring they don't move into a dead spot, and for trackers no way to ensure they don't go beyond range.

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

#322

Post by LorenPechtel »

prawn wrote: post #230
ryanianian wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> retroactively being turned into yet another internet surveillance device. Oh, and an ad-delivery mechanism. Ask Alexa to set a timer, and sometimes she'll rebut with "while you wait why not try Amazon Music!" It's absolutely infuriating. I emailed jeff@amazon.com (VIP support team) and they confirmed it could not be disabled by normal means. They disabled it on their end but then had to do it again when somehow it…

I have never heard anything like an ad on my Echo. If I ask it to set a timer, it does, and then sounds the alarm x minutes later. Nothing else. If the kids ask it to play a song, it plays that song. If they ask it for an animal fact, they get one. Nothing else. Did I toggle something at setup?

She will sometimes tell you about features related to whatever you asked of her--and sometimes those are paid things she's talking about. For example, playing songs at the tier that comes with Prime and she might talk about Amazon Music.

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

#323

Post by crtasm »

ByteJockey wrote: post #268
Scoundreller wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just human movements, but any movements. In Northern Canada, we have tons of fly-in communities that exclusively use satellite internet. And few good opportunities for caching either. Would be cool to have a seamless system where you put in your Netflix request and a couple days later, the shows arrive because the aircraft has a Pi loaded with SD cards on it and boots at ground level.

They'd just mail you dvds instead. This is what netflix used to do.

They still do: https://dvd.netflix.com/

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

#324

Post by secabeen »

katbyte wrote: post #294
secabeen wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple: Their device: "Hi, I'm an AirTag! This is my serial number!" Your device: "hey Apple, I was at (X, Y) when I saw this serial number." > Amazon: Their device: "Hi, can I send traffic through your network?" Your device: "sure, buddy!" I think you're mis-characterizing Amazon here. It's not "can I send traffic through your network", it's "can you pass this message to Amazon for me? Amazon will pass it on to my…

sidewalk device "hey amazon i want to talk to my manufacturer" amazon: "sure thing! let me pipe you through to them" manufacturer "lets connect you to whatever we want on the internet" how is that not unfettered access to whatever the device wants via the manufacture's server?

Because that doesn't give them any access to my internal network, which is the usual objection. If their device wants to talk to an arbitrary server on the public internet, why do I care, when it's all encapsulated in encrypted tunnels? Once the packets emerge from Amazon's server, they can't get back into my network.

Yes, this is using some of my bandwidth, but it's capped at 80kbps and 500MB/month, which seems like a pretty small gift to Amazon and the device manufactuere, assuming it even hits that, which it probably won't in most circumstances.

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

#325

Post by secabeen »

katbyte wrote: post #293
URSpider94 wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When a Tile device associates to another device that detects it, that device has to send a network packet to the cloud that says that it found a Tile with a certain serial number. That’s using your network/your bandwidth to transmit proprietary data about someone else’s property, without asking your permission. That’s exactly the same in kind, just maybe not in degree. New Tile devices can play a sound on command. If…

if this was doing for tile what find my did for airtags i don't think there would be such an uproar - this is open internet for whatever the device and manufacturer want to do not an encrypted "hey katbyte your airtag is here" that only the user at the other end can read - i trust apple, and maybe i trust amazon, but i don't; trust the flood of rando devices that will use and abuse this

Perhaps, but Apple didn't even ask about airtags, they just quietly broadened the "Find My network" across all Apple hardware to support this new feature. And there's nothing stopping apple from generalizing their "Find My" network to pass the same type of data that Amazon is.

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

#326

Post by prawn »

LorenPechtel wrote: post #322
prawn wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never heard anything like an ad on my Echo. If I ask it to set a timer, it does, and then sounds the alarm x minutes later. Nothing else. If the kids ask it to play a song, it plays that song. If they ask it for an animal fact, they get one. Nothing else. Did I toggle something at setup?

She will sometimes tell you about features related to whatever you asked of her--and sometimes those are paid things she's talking about. For example, playing songs at the tier that comes with Prime and she might talk about Amazon Music.

I can't recall mine ever doing that. We use it mostly with Spotify. No Prime and not in the US, so that might mean that we miss those things.

If one of the kids botches a request, it might suggest something they could ask, but it's always basic stuff.

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

#327

Post by nanidin »

bigfudge wrote: post #307
nanidin wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So the tax evasion, worker abuses and militant anti-unionisation weren't enough! I often see comments like this, and I truly wonder if anything would prevent people from using Amazon. I don't want to criticise you specifically — it's so easy to say you would switch but becoming increasingly difficult to do. And motivated cognition is really a thing.

Tax evasion, worker abuses, and anti-unionization all happen far away from me and require some kind of SJW attitude to motivate change. I don’t see these things, they don’t impact me directly, so it’s no wonder they don’t factor into my decision making as much as things things that are actually happening in my home.

Alexa advertising to me, becoming a nuisance, and coopting my internet connection all happen close to me.

I ordered two HomePod Minis to replace the Echo Dots in my home yesterday. Amazon will no longer have a foothold in my home, and won’t have visibility into my shopping list or other usage.

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

#329

Post by ThatPlayer »

saalweachter wrote: post #247
swiley wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh wow, that's plenty for email and text messaging. Where do I go to sing up to use sidewalk and cancel my cellular connection? Not having to deal with Qualcomm's stuff would be fantastic.

I wonder how far you could mesh up the east coast, if you had mesh devices in every home, and what the round trip time over that range would look like if you're hitting a device every hundred feet or so.

I don't think something like that is possible. Without a centrally accessible authority, you cannot efficiently route data. Which is important with how low bandwidth something like LoRa is (and even Wifi may not have enough range/bandwidth). I don't think mesh can scale up like that.

Something like Meshtastic (FOSS mesh messaging project which uses the same LoRa wireless as Amazon's Sidewalk) blindly broadcasts, and any node that picks up the message repeats it. So with a big enough mesh, you'd use up all wireless bandwidth just repeating messages. Even if the recipient is right next to you.

If you could theoretically build a list of nodes, to efficiently route data by doing a shortest path, at some size the data needed to keep the node list up to date would eat up all the bandwidth. Because like messages in the previous method, every change in the node distance tree would have to propagate throughout the entire network.

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

#330

Post by robotcookies »

local_dev wrote: post #148
monkeynotes wrote: post #103

Why the dickens isn't this opt-in? Now we live in a world where a corp can sit on your own home network and do business using your bandwidth without you explicitly agreeing. Not to mention the potential for security issues.

We all know the answer to this. It absolutely should be opt-in, but they know that around 96% of people will never opt-in. See: iOS 14.5 privacy changes.

They just need to create some incentive to opt in. It could be get some discount or your devices get a fallback if you allow other users to get a fallback in the event of internet loss. That would be the right way to do this.
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