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PSA: Disable “Amazon Sidewalk” on your Amazon devices
- Thread starter Dalek
- Start date
I went and did just that. I did notice that there appears to be a second sub setting for the neighbor stuff? Sidewalk was on but Neighbor something was off. I turned the whole thing off and deleted the app anyway, but maybe the sharing part is opt in?
Jesus Christ. I have Comcast and I had no idea, but thankfully I've always used my own equipment.
I don't see it listed, but does this affect Eero routers? When I bought it earlier this year the Amazon connection was the only thing that bothered me.
One big happy amazon family eh? If the world was all sunshine and rainbows we could share bandwith with strangers, but this sounds like amazon trying to get more money out of customers? And an opt out service with potential security risk is kind of scary. Hey alexa, don't activate sidewalk.
Ya the xfinity wifi option is always bothered me with how it works. Luckily it can be disabled as well. And at least it's just the modem and not a jillion other things.
You go to xfininity.com login with your Comcast account, then go to your devices then manage xfinity wifi and disable it.
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It's a thing with every French ISP that i know of. It unexpectedly was quite useful one time when I was younger had no internet access on my phone and had to get stuff on the net in a pinch. The bandwidth is not enough to do much of anything except loading your mails, or other very basic stuff.
Sure love the idea of strangers being able to transmit whatever they want under my IP. Nobody could do anything bad with that.
Yeah the reality is if there was no bandwidth cap, the government could very well mandate all ISP-provided routers to be able to do the same.
Telcoms have been doing this for years. If you're renting a cable box with wifi in it, it's probably blasting out an open wifi channel.
What ISPs do is really shitty, but it is NOT the same as this.
To be reductive, ISPs are stealing some of your bandwidth for use by other customers as a dumb pipe. It's just the transport layer.
Amazon is stealing your bandwidth and network access to create an IOT panopticon that they have exclusive domain over. Its use is at the application layer.
Damn, another pebble on the mountain of ways that Comcast sucks hard. That's messed up.
OK I'm stealing "IOT panopticon" it's a really elegant way to describe the distopian ubiquity of corporate surveillance.
Comcast puts out an Xfinity wifi SSID that's completely separate from your network.
I can't imagine Amazon will allow access to people's internal network through shared wifi.
Anyway, you people shouldn't be using Ring anyway. They're only trying to create a police surveillance state.
If I didn't have a cap, I wouldn't be as concerned with my neighbors. But because I do and the security concerns, I turned it off
I don't think it's in the dot, the access is through the Alexa app
I recall seeing this and saying no thanks. And checked again and yep- there it is on. Time to turn it off and check in another week to see if they turned it on again.
lol amazon wants to offer the convenience of free internet to lure people to their devices and apps but wants you to foot the bill and the security risks that come with it. they know the majority of people won't even know to shut it off so it will likely be successful.
Reading a bit more about this, for those wanting a bit more info on what this is besides what's in the OP, essentially Amazon will leverage common consumer devices which would expected to be located within close proximity of home WiFi routers as a bridge for their other devices located further away. They will do this using BLE for devices in close proximity or LoRA for devices located further away. The bridge devices will be connected over WiFi and then have side links using BLE and LoRA.
BLE I'm assuming people are aware of already but LoRA is simply a wireless protocol for use in low bandwidth IoT applications that is used over the ISM bands for long range communications. There's several start up carriers who have setup their own LoRAWAN networks for use in IoT. Some cities have partnered with some of these carriers and even provide free access. While LoRAWAN is open source, the physical layer protocol is proprietary with design and manufacturing done by a single company called Semtech, who are supplying Amazon with the radio chips for Sidewalk.
I'm not too concerned about security tbh. Devices and applications need to go through two layers of authentication (device and application) before they are accepted by the end points and granted connectivity. This shouldn't be sharing any sensitive private WiFi network details to other devices as it uses a totally different side link with its own protocol. I'm assuming Amazon have followed good security practice on storing credentials information on their hardware for this.
What is concerning is the amount of interference this will add to the ISM band. Amazon has the scale to flood the market with these devices and render this particular slice of the ISM band useless.
Also concerning is the bandwidth usage. As others have said, data passed using Sidelink should really be unmetered when bandwidth caps exist. I would hope Amazon have put in some caps in their system on how much can be data transported using Sidelink.
BLE I'm assuming people are aware of already but LoRA is simply a wireless protocol for use in low bandwidth IoT applications that is used over the ISM bands for long range communications. There's several start up carriers who have setup their own LoRAWAN networks for use in IoT. Some cities have partnered with some of these carriers and even provide free access. While LoRAWAN is open source, the physical layer protocol is proprietary with design and manufacturing done by a single company called Semtech, who are supplying Amazon with the radio chips for Sidewalk.
I'm not too concerned about security tbh. Devices and applications need to go through two layers of authentication (device and application) before they are accepted by the end points and granted connectivity. This shouldn't be sharing any sensitive private WiFi network details to other devices as it uses a totally different side link with its own protocol. I'm assuming Amazon have followed good security practice on storing credentials information on their hardware for this.
What is concerning is the amount of interference this will add to the ISM band. Amazon has the scale to flood the market with these devices and render this particular slice of the ISM band useless.
Also concerning is the bandwidth usage. As others have said, data passed using Sidelink should really be unmetered when bandwidth caps exist. I would hope Amazon have put in some caps in their system on how much can be data transported using Sidelink.
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OP
OP
Found it on My Echo Dot ver 3, went ahead and disabled it, good looking out OP....this is such a terrible to have enabled ON by default.
"Alexa, order me 3 white slaves and one thermonuclear device of yield 5 megatons"
Your order will be delivered Monday, November 30th by 8PM. Thank you for shopping at Amazon.
I went through my Alexa app and only see guest access, nothing about sidewalk. I disabled the guest access, but I don't see "sidewalk" going to were the op says in settings, and I'm in the US.
One thing I noticed, depending on how old your phone/app are, is that the option might not appear in the app if the device is old. My dad's phone is old as shit, and his Alexa app didn't mention Sidewalk under settings. I uninstalled the app on his phone and installed it on my mom's phone instead, which is much newer, and the Sidewalk option was there.
If they need more bandwidth they'll just bury it in the new mandatory ToS. This statement on the website is pretty meaningless.
