Last week, Amazon opened up the Sidewalk protocol to third-party developers. Sidewalk is a large mesh network based on the home Internet connections of people across the United States. It’s a service that takes a lot of trust, and so far, most of the devices on it happen to be Amazon’s own products. But that’s about to change — and as a result, Sidewalk’s privacy safeguards are about to be tested on a much larger scale.
No connected device is 100% private or secure. But so far, despite some initial concerns, Sidewalk has avoided any major privacy disasters. Here’s a summary of how Sidewalk works, the risks it might pose to you as a user, and what we know about Amazon’s plans to defuse it.
The sidewalk looks like that He should It’s a nightmare for privacy. An Amazon Echo or Ring camera is used as a bridge to suck a small portion of the internet’s bandwidth, which is pooled together to create a mesh network. The more sidewalk bridges in your area, the better.
Why would you want this? It is a way to ensure that your smart devices work even if there is no stable Wi-Fi connection. Let’s say you stick a Ring spotlight on your garage door, out of range of your router. This device can instead take advantage of Sidewalk to stay connected. Sidewalk is also similar to Apple’s Find My network when it comes to Bluetooth item or location tracking. Before Sidewalk compatibility was added, tile trackers were mostly limited to your phone’s Bluetooth range. This is fine if you lose your keys at home but not useful if you lose them on the street. Now, some Tile trackers can take advantage of the Sidewalk network to let owners know their last known location — even if you’re miles away.
Your devices are communicating and transmitting data over a network made of bandwidth borrowed from strangers? It looks fishy. However, experts say they aren’t too concerned about Amazon Sidewalk’s security and privacy protocols, which include three layers of encryption to secure data. (You can read more about it in this white paper.)
“Everyone who’s seen the (Sidewalk privacy) protocol says it’s a good protocol,” says John Callas, director of public interest technology at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “There are no major flaws.”
Amazon Sidewalk was quietly announced in 2019, but the privacy hype started in earnest before its launch in June 2021. It centered around the fact that Sidewalk was an opt-out service. If you have an Echo or Ring that can act as a bridge when you launch the Sidewalk, it’s enabled by default via an over-the-air update. Amazon said it sent users an email detailing how to opt out, but who among us has read every e-commerce email in their inbox? It didn’t help that the setting was — and still is — hard to find in the Alexa app. The best option for privacy and security was to enable the service. Instead, the reaction was backlash, and the Sidewalk didn’t make a stellar first impression.