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America really needs GDPR at a federal level.
At the end of the day, it's consumers who drive this technology.
The sad aspect is that it could be indeed a good move, if only it was implemented properly.

Offering free moderate speed connectivity for devices would be great but should be vendor agnostic, no strings attached, and made appealing also for not tech users. Let's say I sign up for broadband contract at 100/20 Mb down/up (which is what I would actually have if I wasn't too far away from my local cabinet), now I can either get all that bandwidth for myself, or offer say 1/10 of it both ways so that part of it is guaranteed no matter the load (let's say 1/50 of the total, that would be for sensors, alarms etc) and the remaining is low prioritized against my traffic, for video, audio, small files etc. The ISP should then offer discounts to motivate people to choose the latter, at the same time making clear that nobody on the host network could access the LAN.

It wouldn't be that different from the Fonera project I participated in about 15 years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fon_(company)

I really think opening some Lora gateway back to Amazon cloud will be in the 100MB/month area. Hardly worth fretting about for most.
> Amazon is building a Wi-Fi network – using your Wi-Fi.

Article is incorrect right from the first sentence. Sidewalk is a LoRA based network, not a Wi-Fi network. "Wireless network" would be more accurate.

I work for Amazon so can't comment too much. However as an Amazon customer, the Sidewalk whitepaper (linked in the article) leaves me not at all concerned to leave this opted in.