The email I received states this will be an opt-out feature... knee jerk reaction is mixed. I'll need to review the privacy terms/data use limitations.
There's something ironic about the corporate overlord tricking its consumers into pooling their resources with their community (and probably getting bitten by the data caps that other corporations impose).
They are completely worthless. They can do whatever they want in their servers and in the devices planted in people's homes, and there's no way of us knowing it. And if by some miracle that does come out, then they will get slapped with half a day revenue in fines (courtesy of bourgeois-captured government), and move on with their lives.
Tried to opt-out, followed the instructions and no option there... Updated the app, still no opt-out available...
Another reason to switch to some offline home brewed smart speaker.
> Where can I change my Amazon Sidewalk preferences?
Available later this year, Ring customers who own an eligible device can choose to update their Amazon Sidewalk preferences anytime from the Control Center in the Ring app or Ring website. Echo customers who own an eligible device can update their Amazon Sidewalk preferences anytime from Settings in the Alexa app. If you have linked your Ring and Amazon accounts, your Sidewalk preferences on either your Alexa or Ring app will apply to all of your eligible Echo and Ring devices.
The E-Mail they sent had different wording, only mentioning ring as example for things this works with:
> For example, if your device loses its wifi connection, Sidewalk can simplify reconnecting to your router and help set up new Echo devices. Sidewalk can also extend the coverage for Sidewalk-enabled devices, such as Ring smart lights and pet and object trackers, so they can stay connected and continue to work over longer distances.
> When enabled, Sidewalk uses a small portion of your Internet bandwidth to provide these services to you and your neighbors. This setting will apply to all of your supported Echo and Ring devices that are linked to your Amazon account.
> Sidewalk is coming to your Echo device later this year, but you can disable this feature at any time from the Amazon Alexa app.
Why? The smart speaker is designed to capture audio and send it to Amazon. The only dumbness is in the people who install it and THEN complain about their privacy. How did you think it worked?
This the same argument that the NSA used when they claimed they weren't listening to everyone's phone calls: it was just algorithms parsing the data so that's 'ok' then.
The speaker is installed to capture audio according to a set of established and generally understood rules – i.e. not listening all the time, and sending audio when being interacted with by a user.
This establishes some reasonable privacy expectations with users – I can be reasonably confident that an Amazon speaker in my home is not listening to me all the time, assuming that Amazon or a malicious third-party is not lying to me.
It is possible to accept this set of trade-offs, and yet be unhappy with some other set of potential tradeoffs (like this new feature). This is not an inconsistent position and nor does it mean that a person who doesn't want to use this new feature is dumb.
Do you have the same objection for anybody who carries a smartphone (i.e. literally billions of people worldwide)? They mostly offer the _exact same feature_ – does carrying a smartphone mean that none of those smartphone users are able to object to some privacy rules that they do not like? Obviously that would be ridiculous.
This has been analyzed to death here on HN, but I'll highlight one of the many problems with that position. Amazon products (whether maliciously or not) capture far more audio than they need to do their job, they send it to Amazon, and Amazon sends it to third-party contractors to analze by hand as a step in building their NLP models and whatnot. Echoes are marketed as AI magic, and a reasonable consumer would not expect that hours of sensitive conversations are being listened to by anyone, much less an unknown third party that Amazon has little control over. In my mind, that scenario is qualitatively different from and worse than shipping small amounts of pertinent data to a machine which can't be bribed or manipulated.
Th audio that these devices capture that is "more than they need to do their job" is, to my understanding, the result of accidental activations. Not great, but one of the privacy considerations to be aware of when using one of these devices.
But I, for example, have my Echo configured to automatically delete voice recordings, and to disallow manual review. I'm pretty comfortable with the privacy compromise involved.
Maybe what you're actually driving at is the somewhat more dodgy practices involved around consent. Everybody should criticise Amazon for their processes here. Manual review is probably generally unexpected, and the default option for an Alexa speaker should be recording no data and allowing no manual review, with both features being explicitly opt-in. This is something it would be fair to pressure Amazon to do, if it's not already the case.
But the point is – it's a dumb argument that "anybody who uses one of these devices doesn't get to complain" and I'm bored of it.
> But I, for example, have my Echo configured to automatically delete voice recordings, and to disallow manual review.
Let me see if I understand correctly.
You bought a device from a third-party (Amazon in this case), which intentionally listens to audio in your home and sends that data elsewhere - literally a promoted "feature".
You obviously don't trust said "third-party" with your audio, as shown by you admitting that you toggled a couple checkboxes to delete your voice recordings and disallow manual review.
And you trust that these settings that you clicked on, on a settings page designed by said third-party, actually do what they say they do?
I mean, your trust has some really odd boundaries.
"I trust Amazon! Except not entirely... But I trust them when they give me the option to make them more trustworthy! Kinda..."
OP has a point. It's literally a spy device designed to help you control music and order toilet paper. Cool, yes. But it's still what it is... People have a justifiable reason to not trust anything about these devices and go with the roll-your-own-sollution route. It's nowhere near a "dumb argument".
Yes, you understand correctly. I am willing to give up some amount of privacy in exchange for some features, like pretty much everybody who uses some kind of connected device.
I'm aware of the level of privacy and control that I want to have of the data I produce, and have set the appropriate settings.
I am reasonably confident that the tools provided to control this do what they say. It's possible that Amazon is lying to me, but I have no immediate reason to think that is the case.
I don't find this odd, counterintuitive, or unusual in any way.
"I trust Amazon! Except not entirely... But I trust them when they give me the option to make them more trustworthy! Kinda..."
More like… "I trust Amazon to do the things that they say they do, and this is the extent to which I am willing to risk my data on that".
It's literally a spy device
No, it's literally not.
People have a justifiable reason to not trust anything about these devices
People are entirely free to make their own decisions about what level of trust they are willing to place on third parties.
It's nowhere near a "dumb argument".
Yes, the argument that anybody who uses one of these devices has then essentially no right to control or complain about the privacy of them is obviously dumb.
Yes, it literally is. It's a remote-accessible listening device, controllable by someone who is not you. By any classical definition, this is a spy device...
> Yes, the argument that anybody who uses one of these devices has then essentially no right to control or complain about the privacy of them is obviously dumb.
Moving goal posts and bordering a straw-man argument by adding the "no right to control" part, but saying it's obviously dumb doesn't make it so and isn't productive conversation.
When you buy third-party hardware running third-party software that you cannot audit yourself, there is implicit risk that the device can do nefarious things. I don't explicitly believe that Amazon is doing anything malicious, but I also don't trust their systems implicitly. One developer with the right access can potentially remote-access any device, anywhere...
I understand this risk, and I believe you do as well, but I also don't go around complaining that this risk exists. This is implicit in purchasing third-party products, which is the underlying point the argument tries to make...
Got this as present and couldn't resist trying it, sticked with it for 1,5 years now, but have blocked telemetry with pihole.
However API has changed and sometimes you need to disable the firewall for things to work.
Therefore I am currently planning n on getting something like respeaker.
Honestly, it would be so cliche if all the top comments about this were Privacy Pearl Clutching from people who didn't take a look at how the protocol actually works or what it's implications might be.
It is from Amazon, so there is no privacy and security is only there to the extent that it prevents either bad press or someone else blocking the ability of Amazon to exfiltrate as much advertiser-worthy data as it can from your network and anyone who happens to wander into range.
Yes, Amazon doesn't care about privacy, Google only kills products, and Facebook is only interested in whatever increases ad click throughs.
Now that we got that out of the way, could we actually sometimes have a conversation about some of the technical works that the people at these companies create that might be relevant to the people in this community?
All the privacy protections are about preventing other users from monitoring the network. Amazon however will know everything, like what devices you have installed, where they are, who they communicate with, what they monitor, etc, etc. They are using the word 'privacy' to mean "we won't tell you what we know"
Privacy at these companies always always means "we protect your data from others." No company will ever paint itself as a potentially untrustworthy party.
Bluetooth and "other frequencies" have been proven useful to track the physical locations of human bodies. So not only will they hear everything you say, but they'll know when you're not in the room watching that one particular ad on your blaring TV.
What is Amazon Sidewalk?
Amazon Sidewalk is a shared network
that helps devices work better. Operated
by Amazon at no charge to customers,
Sidewalk can help simplify new device
setup, extend the low-bandwidth working
range of devices, and help devices stay
online even if they are outside the range
of their home wifi. In the future, Sidewalk
will support a range of experiences from using
Sidewalk-enabled devices to help find pets or
valuables, to smart security and lighting, to
diagnostics for appliances and tools.
Uh, OK, I still don't know what Amazon Sidewalk is. This language doesn't sound sketchy or evasive at all...
> I'm actually surprised that ISPs didn't come together to just build this into their access points.
Comcast does something like this (though not technically a mesh) but only for their own customers. If your AP is set to share access, then as a Comcast customer you get a sort of 'roaming' access through any other Comcast AP that is also set to share.
As I recall, it was turned on by default and opt-out, but you were on your own so far as actually finding an AP you could mooch off of. Guest access is always prioritized below the owner.
Also from memory, which may be faulty, out of date, or both: There is some reasonable limit to the total bandwidth you can use as a guest from sharing APs each month (I think it was maybe something like 50GB), and other customers' guest use of your AP doesn't count toward your own data cap.
I also vaguely recall some sort of upsell for your account to remove your data limit as a guest, or at least increase it.
I would guess that if other ISPs start offering their customers the same sort of setup, the next step would be peering agreements between them.
The first half seems like simple bandwidth sharing, like mobile hotspots.
But everything after "In the future", is super vague. Help find pets etc, looks like it'll try to make a pooled community video set-up and someone can search across all the cameras.
From what I understand, each of your devices can act as a mini-wifi extender.
And that extended WiFi is public (to other Amazon sidewalk devices).
And that's useful if you have say, smart outdoor lights which could be out of your Wifi range.
And later to use the devices as a sort of pooled resource for things like search-and-rescue in a community? I didn't really get what they are trying here.
Apart from the instinctive privacy and big-tech worries (an admittedly big aside), this seems like it could be pretty cool.
Hearing Philips in this context made me think of the Philips Hue worm that theoretically could spread from lightbulb to lightbulb to attack an entire city: https://eyalro.net/project/iotworm.html
“And that's useful if you have say, smart outdoor lights which could be out of your Wifi range.”
…and inside of that of you neighbor, and your WiFi can reach your neighbor’s WiFi. I have trouble imagining cases where that applies. The first part might apply if you have a large garden, your neighbor a tiny one, and you want lights all over your garden. However, that still wouldn’t help with the “your WiFi can reach your neighbor’s WiFi” part, unless that goes over the internet, via Amazon’s servers (introducing a new point of failure in the process)
I think the use case is more “where’s my dog/child/stolen laptop?”
The way privacy protection works is first they take your privacy and then try their best to protect it. How can they protect something they don't have ?
Depending on the specifics of the implementation, and who you trust, it may not be ironic at all. Securing a surveillance camera feed isn't exactly difficult.
So you let Amazon use your WiFi to bridge their proprietary IoT network to the internet, potentially lending your bandwidth to anyone near you with an Amazon device. Existing Amazon devices already support it and it will be turned on soon. Is this opt in or opt out?
> Amazon Sidewalk uses Bluetooth, the 900 MHz spectrum and other frequencies
> The maximum bandwidth [...] is 80 Kbps [...] capped at 500 MB [per month]
That's the frustrating part. It reads like opt-out, but when I go check the settings on the app as per the instructions it looks like it's already disabled. But it says "Coming Soon"?
So am I supposed to check the app for the next couple weeks until it's forced turned-on, and then disable it?
Definitely not what I would call "Customer Obsession". If anyone knows how to cripple the echo via firewall rules, while still keeping most of its functionality, please let me know.
"Customer Obsession" just not in the way expected :)
By the way, I called customer service for a company (not amazon), and the first message was "This call will be recorded for quality and training purposes"...
And I couldn't help but think "training" might not be what I expect.. could training mean machine learning?
Google maps allows google to add your location to their knowledge graph in various ways (real time, plans, favorites, etc). It's so well done that it would take a herculean effort to create a competitor map service (see OSM). Amazon can't compete here, I suspect.
I'm not a wlan engineer. Can someone smarter tell me if this tech can be used to expand Amazon's location knowledge to track non-user devices more intelligently, i.e. across neighborhoods?
Amazon here is effectively bootstrapping their own global mesh network. Fun and scary in equal measure.
I wonder if this was in the original plan for the Echo all along, or just evolved organically. It definitely has potential for being another well-paved road to total-surveillance hell.
I think a global mesh network is inevitable - every thing is going to talk to the devices around it (and eventually to wired humans) all the time wirelessly.
It'd be nice if it were not in the control of any corporation.
I'm not a free market capitalist, so I'm surprised I"m about to write this... but we should try to get The Market to solve this.
If those of us who're privacy conscious stopped paying Amazon money, we could use that money to create/buy privacy-focused alternatives. I'm not talking about Amazon the shop (although that's a good avenue of attack too), I'm talking about AWS. Stop using AWS. Loudly take your money to another cloud supplier. Amazon competes on volume, so remove the volume. Leave them with warehouses of redundant servers until they have to sell them off. And then buy one.
Stop giving Amazon money. Don’t buy stuff from eBay. Don’t use Google, Gmail, Chrome. Don’t give Comcast your business. Don’t use Windows. Avoid Apple and their predatory App Store fees. Don’t buy stuff from Walmart. Don’t give Sony your money. And the list goes on..
You see where I am going? This will never work. David cannot win over Goliath every single time.
That’s why we need another giant, the government, to fight for us.
But we don’t want the government to interfere with capitalism, do we? We want to have our pie and eat it too.
Unrestrained capitalism is not compatible with freedom, it's as simple as that. Without hyperbole, Amazon/Google/etc have more power than most countries on earth. This power is almost completely unaccountable to democratic control. Is this really what we want?
Not sure about the fun part. Nothing about what Amazon is doing is fun for me anymore.
I've got a drawer full of unused echos, chromecasts, etc. I haven't had a prime subscription for over 2 years now because every time I order something its a 50/50 that I will get a shitty ripoff from China. I am desperately looking to get off of their cloud offerings too.
I wish more would recognize the convenience of Amazon for the dystopia that it truly is and then act with their wallets. Shopping at 3 different online retailers vs 1 isn't that much of an added inconvenience, and I personally find that when you order direct from the manufacturer (when possible) that your success rate on getting high quality, non-fake stuff nears 100%. AWS is a harder sell because of how wide the feature set is, but there are options for any scale.
This isn't even scratching the surface on how they treat many of their employees. Who is working in an amazon warehouse right now and actually having a good time of it? Amazon could easily automate away many jobs they never wanted in the first place, but sacrificing lower-skilled humans do the last mile of messy pick & place turns out to be more friendly to margins.
I agree that Amazon isn't good for competition, and some of their business practices are troubling. I'm just tired of seeing some of the points you made pop up in every Amazon topic.
> I haven't had a prime subscription for over 2 years now because every time I order something its a 50/50 that I will get a shitty ripoff from China.
Were you ordering expensive sneakers and purses regularly? You'd think if this was the experience of even a minor fraction of their customers (beyond the HN commenters who claim this is wide spread in every Amazon topic), they wouldn't be breaking record sales every quarter.
> This isn't even scratching the surface on how they treat many of their employees. Who is working in an amazon warehouse right now and actually having a good time of it?
Who is doing manual labor of any form and having a good time of it? Amazon to their credit gave a minimum wage of 15 USD to these workers, often ahead of the states they're located in, and the workers get full health care and benefits. I'm not saying they can't be paid more or shouldn't be paid more, but I'm going to acknowledge their agency. Over 800k of them picked Amazon over say Walmart or Costco or some other warehouse job.
> Amazon could easily automate away many jobs they never wanted in the first place, but sacrificing lower-skilled humans do the last mile of messy pick & place turns out to be more friendly to margins.
Companies hire people to do work if it's profitable is the essence of this objection? There are complex systems that lead people to accepting these jobs -- America's failing education system, the lack of upward mobility and opportunity for many citizens, lack of focus on trade / manufacturing jobs in school, etc.. You take the easy route of blaming a corporation doing corporation things.
> > I haven't had a prime subscription for over 2 years now because every time I order something its a 50/50 that I will get a shitty ripoff from China.
> Were you ordering expensive sneakers and purses regularly? You'd think if this was the experience of even a minor fraction of their customers (beyond the HN commenters who claim this is wide spread in every Amazon topic), they wouldn't be breaking record sales every quarter.
Come on, you know as well as I that there is not necessarily a correlation there: between record quarter sales and counterfeit products. I agree that claims of 50% counterfeit products is an exaggeration but to point to their quarterly sales is as refutation is silly.
Sales could be increasing for any number of reasons unrelated to customer satisfaction. Cusatomers could be unaware they are purchasing counterfeit products, etc.
> who is doing manual labor of any kind and having a good time of it
I take your point.
That said, many (or even most?) people enjoy doing some amount of physical work. However, Taylorism and the industrial revolution tended to make physical work so repetitive that it become unsatisfying.
For example, in my experience, UPS drivers often like a job where they get to be outside and active. I don't have surveys at hand, but I would guess that skilled laborers like the work itself. Their bosses, sick time, injuries, probably not so much.
I would ask everyone to think about future scenarios where work can have more physical aspects -- there are advantages to long term happiness and productivity that I think get overlooked.
> I've got a drawer full of unused echos, chromecasts, etc.
At this point I already have so many devices in my house it won't matter if I add more. I gave up my privacy for convince a long time ago. Let me know if you'd like me to take those off your hands. :)
> Shopping at 3 different online retailers vs 1 isn't that much of an added inconvenience
I've tried ordering direct from the manufacturer. It's true that authenticity is higher, but everything else is worse. Do I have to pay shipping? How much will be it? I need to put in my credit card again, will it be safe? Will I get any cash back on my purchase? With Amazon, I already know, shipping is free, my 5% cash back card will be default and is secure. It literally takes me a less than 20 seconds to buy something on Amazon if I already know what I want.
> Who is working in an amazon warehouse right now and actually having a good time of it?
I know one person who works at an Amazon warehouse. She says it's the best job she's ever had. She's extremely grateful to be working right now in a good job with a flexible schedule, because she's a single mom in nursing school. Anecdata of course, she's just one person. But in my sample set of 1, there is 100% satisfaction.
> I've tried ordering direct from the manufacturer. It's true that authenticity is higher, but everything else is worse.
Be careful though. I have found, like OP, that everything about Amazon has been getting worse over time.
Free shipping? Well, if you forget that your'e paying for Amazon Prime itself. Also, it seems less things I have been buying of late qualify for Amazon Prime. Is it a change in my spending habits or are Prime products as a percentage of all Amazon goods shrinking? I don't know.
As for the 5% cashback credit card — I have the same. But I am increasingly finding that prices at Amazon are not competitive when I look around. Storage bins at Lowes, a good deal more than 5% less than the same product at Amazon. An electric chainsaw, same brand model, more than 5% less at Home Depot than Amazon. I know it's anecdotal (and many other things are the same price when I shop around) but I am beginning to wonder if Amazon is getting their "free shipping" and 5% back in other ways....
Buying things is a pain in the ass. In companies, purchasing is a full time job, trying to negotiate prices and discounts. and on the other hand you have sellers trying to maximize margin.
Buying things from stores used to contain a large amount of going place to place and comparing prices/features. Online it became easier to compare both but I have been finding it harder to find specs and sometimes pricing recently....
If you have control over both the marketplace and information, you have greater control over the transaction.
If either of you means the Amazon credit card when you talk of a 5% cash back card, you might find Bank of America's cash back card an interesting alternative.
Nominally, it does not compare, at least for things bought from Amazon. It's 3% in a category of your choice (gas, online shopping, dining, travel, drug stores, or home improvement/furnishings), 2% grocery stores and wholesale clubs, and 1% in everything else.
But those are all multiplied by 1.25, 1.50, or 1.75 if you have balances of at least $20k, $50k, or $100k, respectively, in certain BofA or Merrill Lynch accounts. What matters is the total in all our eligible BofA and Merrill accounts.
Transfer $100k worth of your mutual funds or your IRA to Merrill, pick "online shopping" as your 3% category, and with the multiplier you've got 5.25% cash back at Amazon. And at Newegg. And at online orders at Walmart, Best Buy, and so on. At some stores it counts as online if you order through their website or app for in-store pickup, too.
You can change the category once per calendar month, so if you are planning on a big purchase at, say Home Depot, just buy near the end of the month and switch the category to home improvement/furnishings before buying, and switch back to online when the month rolls over.
>> This isn't even scratching the surface on how they treat many of their employees. Who is working in an amazon warehouse right now and actually having a good time of it? Amazon could easily automate away many jobs they never wanted in the first place, but sacrificing lower-skilled humans do the last mile of messy pick & place turns out to be more friendly to margins.
<<
So how much would you pay warehouse workers and why do you think warehouse job in Amazon requires so kind of special treatment or salary?
Amazon has been aggressively giving Echos away, surely at a loss. Is the grand strategy becoming apparent? The data alone will more than pay for it?
My son got a free Echo and plugged it in in my house. When I saw it I was a little bugged but played around with it before putting it up. Now I fear my reaction will be more like, "Good God son, what have you done?"
>When enabled, Sidewalk uses a small portion of your Internet bandwidth to provide these services to you and your neighbors.
> To disable this feature, follow these instructions.
Amazon is changing the meaning of "When enabled" from "When enabled by the user" to "When the feature is on" and if I have to be this careful reading their end user copy I have no use for Alexa. Bad form using this dark pattern.
I keep reading the description but I'm really struggling to come up with a common use case for this.
A number of ISPs in the UK (I think both BT and Sky) used to do something similar (possibly still do), where you would add a special network to your router that was only open to other people who also added the network to theirs, so you could use each others when out and about. It was all tunnelled and secure. It was genuinly useful in the days before 4G mobile and widespread wifi in shops and cafes, I used it a lot.
With this I just don't see what devices would be using it. It isn't something you can just piggyback on to check your email. It feels like this is preperation for some new device or service.
Or am I underestimating the number of people who want to put an Alexa device somewhere that they don't have a network, but which is close to someone elses network?
I would think this so cool if it were a grassroots project or even a plucky little startup.
But seeing a FAANG badge on it makes me fear the ramifications. People will opt-in for convenience, and it'll wind up further entrenching the existing players (which I feel will be bad for users over the long term).
If you're a product manufacturer interested in creating devices with Amazon Sidewalk access, click here for more information"
Great, now every device I bring into my home can access the internet without my knowledge because neighbors are on Sidewalk. Now we know how smart tvs will secretly report our viewing habits, no 5G needed.
Suprised that my smartphone with the Alexa app are not part of the Sidewalk network.
"Don’t think you need Amazon Sidewalk? No worries. You can update this anytime from the Ring or Alexa mobile apps." Really makes it sound like this is going to be on by default...
Someone just showed me a chat with Amazon Customer Service where they asked how to disable Sidewalk on an Echo Dot 3rd Gen without using these apps and the customer service rep quit without responding. Curious if that is the official response to that question.
It'll depend on your ISP but I believe arbitrary sharing of internet access is likely to be prohibited under some ToS. I wonder if it will be acceptable in Germany as I understand they do not allow unsecured WiFi either (whether this counts as unsecured is what I'd expect it to hinge on)
I'm currently on the phone with Amazon because I'm trying to figure out how to turn sidewalk off. the menu doesn't actually appear. it's on by default and there's no way to turn it off even with the most up-to-date version of the app. Amazon seems incredulous and doesn't seem to believe me but that setting doesn't exist in version 2.2372932.0 of the Alexa app
By allowing Alexa into your house to begin with you already capitulated to Amazon’s surveillance. The best and right thing to do is to disconnect and throw them all in the garbage. I really don’t understand how anyone with any IT experience at all ever allowed these constantly recording listening devices into their houses to begin with.
I don't think that is the intent. I believe the want a separate bluetooth network that can use the private network to access the public internet. I don't think the intent is to have the Sidewalk network ever route to the private home network. I don't trust the implementation, but that seems to be the intent and use case.
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[ 111 ms ] story [ 4666 ms ] thread>Today, when you share your Bridge’s connection with Sidewalk, total monthly data used by Sidewalk, per account, is capped at 500MB
I think the "Today" means that they plan to change the data amount daily...
They are completely worthless. They can do whatever they want in their servers and in the devices planted in people's homes, and there's no way of us knowing it. And if by some miracle that does come out, then they will get slapped with half a day revenue in fines (courtesy of bourgeois-captured government), and move on with their lives.
We care about your privacy. Your privacy is important to us
> Where can I change my Amazon Sidewalk preferences? Available later this year, Ring customers who own an eligible device can choose to update their Amazon Sidewalk preferences anytime from the Control Center in the Ring app or Ring website. Echo customers who own an eligible device can update their Amazon Sidewalk preferences anytime from Settings in the Alexa app. If you have linked your Ring and Amazon accounts, your Sidewalk preferences on either your Alexa or Ring app will apply to all of your eligible Echo and Ring devices.
> For example, if your device loses its wifi connection, Sidewalk can simplify reconnecting to your router and help set up new Echo devices. Sidewalk can also extend the coverage for Sidewalk-enabled devices, such as Ring smart lights and pet and object trackers, so they can stay connected and continue to work over longer distances.
> When enabled, Sidewalk uses a small portion of your Internet bandwidth to provide these services to you and your neighbors. This setting will apply to all of your supported Echo and Ring devices that are linked to your Amazon account.
> Sidewalk is coming to your Echo device later this year, but you can disable this feature at any time from the Amazon Alexa app.
Especially if it's recorded and stored somewhere for infinite analysis and replay.
This establishes some reasonable privacy expectations with users – I can be reasonably confident that an Amazon speaker in my home is not listening to me all the time, assuming that Amazon or a malicious third-party is not lying to me.
It is possible to accept this set of trade-offs, and yet be unhappy with some other set of potential tradeoffs (like this new feature). This is not an inconsistent position and nor does it mean that a person who doesn't want to use this new feature is dumb.
Do you have the same objection for anybody who carries a smartphone (i.e. literally billions of people worldwide)? They mostly offer the _exact same feature_ – does carrying a smartphone mean that none of those smartphone users are able to object to some privacy rules that they do not like? Obviously that would be ridiculous.
But I, for example, have my Echo configured to automatically delete voice recordings, and to disallow manual review. I'm pretty comfortable with the privacy compromise involved.
Maybe what you're actually driving at is the somewhat more dodgy practices involved around consent. Everybody should criticise Amazon for their processes here. Manual review is probably generally unexpected, and the default option for an Alexa speaker should be recording no data and allowing no manual review, with both features being explicitly opt-in. This is something it would be fair to pressure Amazon to do, if it's not already the case.
But the point is – it's a dumb argument that "anybody who uses one of these devices doesn't get to complain" and I'm bored of it.
Let me see if I understand correctly.
You bought a device from a third-party (Amazon in this case), which intentionally listens to audio in your home and sends that data elsewhere - literally a promoted "feature".
You obviously don't trust said "third-party" with your audio, as shown by you admitting that you toggled a couple checkboxes to delete your voice recordings and disallow manual review.
And you trust that these settings that you clicked on, on a settings page designed by said third-party, actually do what they say they do?
I mean, your trust has some really odd boundaries.
"I trust Amazon! Except not entirely... But I trust them when they give me the option to make them more trustworthy! Kinda..."
OP has a point. It's literally a spy device designed to help you control music and order toilet paper. Cool, yes. But it's still what it is... People have a justifiable reason to not trust anything about these devices and go with the roll-your-own-sollution route. It's nowhere near a "dumb argument".
I'm aware of the level of privacy and control that I want to have of the data I produce, and have set the appropriate settings.
I am reasonably confident that the tools provided to control this do what they say. It's possible that Amazon is lying to me, but I have no immediate reason to think that is the case.
I don't find this odd, counterintuitive, or unusual in any way.
"I trust Amazon! Except not entirely... But I trust them when they give me the option to make them more trustworthy! Kinda..."
More like… "I trust Amazon to do the things that they say they do, and this is the extent to which I am willing to risk my data on that".
It's literally a spy device
No, it's literally not.
People have a justifiable reason to not trust anything about these devices
People are entirely free to make their own decisions about what level of trust they are willing to place on third parties.
It's nowhere near a "dumb argument".
Yes, the argument that anybody who uses one of these devices has then essentially no right to control or complain about the privacy of them is obviously dumb.
Yes, it literally is. It's a remote-accessible listening device, controllable by someone who is not you. By any classical definition, this is a spy device...
> Yes, the argument that anybody who uses one of these devices has then essentially no right to control or complain about the privacy of them is obviously dumb.
Moving goal posts and bordering a straw-man argument by adding the "no right to control" part, but saying it's obviously dumb doesn't make it so and isn't productive conversation.
When you buy third-party hardware running third-party software that you cannot audit yourself, there is implicit risk that the device can do nefarious things. I don't explicitly believe that Amazon is doing anything malicious, but I also don't trust their systems implicitly. One developer with the right access can potentially remote-access any device, anywhere...
I understand this risk, and I believe you do as well, but I also don't go around complaining that this risk exists. This is implicit in purchasing third-party products, which is the underlying point the argument tries to make...
Perhaps I am missing something, but isn't Amazon the second party to this transaction?
Therefore I am currently planning n on getting something like respeaker.
That earns some trust...
Honestly, it would be so cliche if all the top comments about this were Privacy Pearl Clutching from people who didn't take a look at how the protocol actually works or what it's implications might be.
> "Have curious conversation"
Yes, Amazon doesn't care about privacy, Google only kills products, and Facebook is only interested in whatever increases ad click throughs.
Now that we got that out of the way, could we actually sometimes have a conversation about some of the technical works that the people at these companies create that might be relevant to the people in this community?
Comcast does something like this (though not technically a mesh) but only for their own customers. If your AP is set to share access, then as a Comcast customer you get a sort of 'roaming' access through any other Comcast AP that is also set to share.
As I recall, it was turned on by default and opt-out, but you were on your own so far as actually finding an AP you could mooch off of. Guest access is always prioritized below the owner.
Also from memory, which may be faulty, out of date, or both: There is some reasonable limit to the total bandwidth you can use as a guest from sharing APs each month (I think it was maybe something like 50GB), and other customers' guest use of your AP doesn't count toward your own data cap.
I also vaguely recall some sort of upsell for your account to remove your data limit as a guest, or at least increase it.
I would guess that if other ISPs start offering their customers the same sort of setup, the next step would be peering agreements between them.
But everything after "In the future", is super vague. Help find pets etc, looks like it'll try to make a pooled community video set-up and someone can search across all the cameras.
I can't help thinking that eventually "someone" will be able to search across all the cameras even if there isn't a pooled community video set-up.
And that extended WiFi is public (to other Amazon sidewalk devices).
And that's useful if you have say, smart outdoor lights which could be out of your Wifi range.
And later to use the devices as a sort of pooled resource for things like search-and-rescue in a community? I didn't really get what they are trying here.
Apart from the instinctive privacy and big-tech worries (an admittedly big aside), this seems like it could be pretty cool.
…and inside of that of you neighbor, and your WiFi can reach your neighbor’s WiFi. I have trouble imagining cases where that applies. The first part might apply if you have a large garden, your neighbor a tiny one, and you want lights all over your garden. However, that still wouldn’t help with the “your WiFi can reach your neighbor’s WiFi” part, unless that goes over the internet, via Amazon’s servers (introducing a new point of failure in the process)
I think the use case is more “where’s my dog/child/stolen laptop?”
Alexa products are designed to protect your privacy. They are built with privacy in mind!
> Amazon Sidewalk uses Bluetooth, the 900 MHz spectrum and other frequencies
> The maximum bandwidth [...] is 80 Kbps [...] capped at 500 MB [per month]
That's the frustrating part. It reads like opt-out, but when I go check the settings on the app as per the instructions it looks like it's already disabled. But it says "Coming Soon"?
So am I supposed to check the app for the next couple weeks until it's forced turned-on, and then disable it?
Definitely not what I would call "Customer Obsession". If anyone knows how to cripple the echo via firewall rules, while still keeping most of its functionality, please let me know.
By the way, I called customer service for a company (not amazon), and the first message was "This call will be recorded for quality and training purposes"...
And I couldn't help but think "training" might not be what I expect.. could training mean machine learning?
I'm not a wlan engineer. Can someone smarter tell me if this tech can be used to expand Amazon's location knowledge to track non-user devices more intelligently, i.e. across neighborhoods?
I wonder if this was in the original plan for the Echo all along, or just evolved organically. It definitely has potential for being another well-paved road to total-surveillance hell.
It'd be nice if it were not in the control of any corporation.
How can we make that happen?
If those of us who're privacy conscious stopped paying Amazon money, we could use that money to create/buy privacy-focused alternatives. I'm not talking about Amazon the shop (although that's a good avenue of attack too), I'm talking about AWS. Stop using AWS. Loudly take your money to another cloud supplier. Amazon competes on volume, so remove the volume. Leave them with warehouses of redundant servers until they have to sell them off. And then buy one.
You see where I am going? This will never work. David cannot win over Goliath every single time.
That’s why we need another giant, the government, to fight for us.
But we don’t want the government to interfere with capitalism, do we? We want to have our pie and eat it too.
I've got a drawer full of unused echos, chromecasts, etc. I haven't had a prime subscription for over 2 years now because every time I order something its a 50/50 that I will get a shitty ripoff from China. I am desperately looking to get off of their cloud offerings too.
I wish more would recognize the convenience of Amazon for the dystopia that it truly is and then act with their wallets. Shopping at 3 different online retailers vs 1 isn't that much of an added inconvenience, and I personally find that when you order direct from the manufacturer (when possible) that your success rate on getting high quality, non-fake stuff nears 100%. AWS is a harder sell because of how wide the feature set is, but there are options for any scale.
This isn't even scratching the surface on how they treat many of their employees. Who is working in an amazon warehouse right now and actually having a good time of it? Amazon could easily automate away many jobs they never wanted in the first place, but sacrificing lower-skilled humans do the last mile of messy pick & place turns out to be more friendly to margins.
> I haven't had a prime subscription for over 2 years now because every time I order something its a 50/50 that I will get a shitty ripoff from China.
Were you ordering expensive sneakers and purses regularly? You'd think if this was the experience of even a minor fraction of their customers (beyond the HN commenters who claim this is wide spread in every Amazon topic), they wouldn't be breaking record sales every quarter.
> This isn't even scratching the surface on how they treat many of their employees. Who is working in an amazon warehouse right now and actually having a good time of it?
Who is doing manual labor of any form and having a good time of it? Amazon to their credit gave a minimum wage of 15 USD to these workers, often ahead of the states they're located in, and the workers get full health care and benefits. I'm not saying they can't be paid more or shouldn't be paid more, but I'm going to acknowledge their agency. Over 800k of them picked Amazon over say Walmart or Costco or some other warehouse job.
> Amazon could easily automate away many jobs they never wanted in the first place, but sacrificing lower-skilled humans do the last mile of messy pick & place turns out to be more friendly to margins.
Companies hire people to do work if it's profitable is the essence of this objection? There are complex systems that lead people to accepting these jobs -- America's failing education system, the lack of upward mobility and opportunity for many citizens, lack of focus on trade / manufacturing jobs in school, etc.. You take the easy route of blaming a corporation doing corporation things.
> Were you ordering expensive sneakers and purses regularly? You'd think if this was the experience of even a minor fraction of their customers (beyond the HN commenters who claim this is wide spread in every Amazon topic), they wouldn't be breaking record sales every quarter.
Come on, you know as well as I that there is not necessarily a correlation there: between record quarter sales and counterfeit products. I agree that claims of 50% counterfeit products is an exaggeration but to point to their quarterly sales is as refutation is silly.
Sales could be increasing for any number of reasons unrelated to customer satisfaction. Cusatomers could be unaware they are purchasing counterfeit products, etc.
I take your point.
That said, many (or even most?) people enjoy doing some amount of physical work. However, Taylorism and the industrial revolution tended to make physical work so repetitive that it become unsatisfying.
For example, in my experience, UPS drivers often like a job where they get to be outside and active. I don't have surveys at hand, but I would guess that skilled laborers like the work itself. Their bosses, sick time, injuries, probably not so much.
I would ask everyone to think about future scenarios where work can have more physical aspects -- there are advantages to long term happiness and productivity that I think get overlooked.
At this point I already have so many devices in my house it won't matter if I add more. I gave up my privacy for convince a long time ago. Let me know if you'd like me to take those off your hands. :)
> Shopping at 3 different online retailers vs 1 isn't that much of an added inconvenience
I've tried ordering direct from the manufacturer. It's true that authenticity is higher, but everything else is worse. Do I have to pay shipping? How much will be it? I need to put in my credit card again, will it be safe? Will I get any cash back on my purchase? With Amazon, I already know, shipping is free, my 5% cash back card will be default and is secure. It literally takes me a less than 20 seconds to buy something on Amazon if I already know what I want.
> Who is working in an amazon warehouse right now and actually having a good time of it?
I know one person who works at an Amazon warehouse. She says it's the best job she's ever had. She's extremely grateful to be working right now in a good job with a flexible schedule, because she's a single mom in nursing school. Anecdata of course, she's just one person. But in my sample set of 1, there is 100% satisfaction.
Be careful though. I have found, like OP, that everything about Amazon has been getting worse over time.
Free shipping? Well, if you forget that your'e paying for Amazon Prime itself. Also, it seems less things I have been buying of late qualify for Amazon Prime. Is it a change in my spending habits or are Prime products as a percentage of all Amazon goods shrinking? I don't know.
As for the 5% cashback credit card — I have the same. But I am increasingly finding that prices at Amazon are not competitive when I look around. Storage bins at Lowes, a good deal more than 5% less than the same product at Amazon. An electric chainsaw, same brand model, more than 5% less at Home Depot than Amazon. I know it's anecdotal (and many other things are the same price when I shop around) but I am beginning to wonder if Amazon is getting their "free shipping" and 5% back in other ways....
Buying things is a pain in the ass. In companies, purchasing is a full time job, trying to negotiate prices and discounts. and on the other hand you have sellers trying to maximize margin.
Buying things from stores used to contain a large amount of going place to place and comparing prices/features. Online it became easier to compare both but I have been finding it harder to find specs and sometimes pricing recently....
If you have control over both the marketplace and information, you have greater control over the transaction.
Nominally, it does not compare, at least for things bought from Amazon. It's 3% in a category of your choice (gas, online shopping, dining, travel, drug stores, or home improvement/furnishings), 2% grocery stores and wholesale clubs, and 1% in everything else.
But those are all multiplied by 1.25, 1.50, or 1.75 if you have balances of at least $20k, $50k, or $100k, respectively, in certain BofA or Merrill Lynch accounts. What matters is the total in all our eligible BofA and Merrill accounts.
Transfer $100k worth of your mutual funds or your IRA to Merrill, pick "online shopping" as your 3% category, and with the multiplier you've got 5.25% cash back at Amazon. And at Newegg. And at online orders at Walmart, Best Buy, and so on. At some stores it counts as online if you order through their website or app for in-store pickup, too.
You can change the category once per calendar month, so if you are planning on a big purchase at, say Home Depot, just buy near the end of the month and switch the category to home improvement/furnishings before buying, and switch back to online when the month rolls over.
So how much would you pay warehouse workers and why do you think warehouse job in Amazon requires so kind of special treatment or salary?
The show The Patriot Act covered this exact sentiment in a good segment on Amazon.
My son got a free Echo and plugged it in in my house. When I saw it I was a little bugged but played around with it before putting it up. Now I fear my reaction will be more like, "Good God son, what have you done?"
Will Sidewalk share around these passwords? Will Amazon share them with authorized third parties eventually?
https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
> To disable this feature, follow these instructions.
Amazon is changing the meaning of "When enabled" from "When enabled by the user" to "When the feature is on" and if I have to be this careful reading their end user copy I have no use for Alexa. Bad form using this dark pattern.
A number of ISPs in the UK (I think both BT and Sky) used to do something similar (possibly still do), where you would add a special network to your router that was only open to other people who also added the network to theirs, so you could use each others when out and about. It was all tunnelled and secure. It was genuinly useful in the days before 4G mobile and widespread wifi in shops and cafes, I used it a lot.
With this I just don't see what devices would be using it. It isn't something you can just piggyback on to check your email. It feels like this is preperation for some new device or service.
Or am I underestimating the number of people who want to put an Alexa device somewhere that they don't have a network, but which is close to someone elses network?
But seeing a FAANG badge on it makes me fear the ramifications. People will opt-in for convenience, and it'll wind up further entrenching the existing players (which I feel will be bad for users over the long term).
If you're a product manufacturer interested in creating devices with Amazon Sidewalk access, click here for more information"
Great, now every device I bring into my home can access the internet without my knowledge because neighbors are on Sidewalk. Now we know how smart tvs will secretly report our viewing habits, no 5G needed.
Suprised that my smartphone with the Alexa app are not part of the Sidewalk network.
The phrasing here is very deliberate and diabolical.
You can't clear you browsing history - you can only "hide your browsing history"
I'm sure there will be no way to break out of the mesh network into the protected wifi network.