In this commentary, the speaker explains Amazon’s new Sidewalk network, a low‑bandwidth, community‑wide mesh that links Echo, Ring and other Amazon devices to share Wi‑Fi signals for use cases such as locating a lost pet. While acknowledging the potential convenience, the speaker highlights several security and privacy concerns: the system is untested, traffic from neighboring devices is unknown, it could be exploited for hacking or malware, and Amazon may collect extensive metadata without clear user consent. A major criticism is that Sidewalk is enabled by default, exposing customers who may not understand the risks. The speaker urges users to manually disable Sidewalk in their device settings until the service is better vetted, advocating for an opt‑in rollout rather than automatic activation.
Chapters
Amazon is coming out with its new Sidewalk network, and it's got some great potential for both good but potentially bad as well. Now, this particular network, what it does is if you've got an Amazon device like an Echo, it will then connect with other devices and other networks in your community who also have these types of Amazon products. And the bandwidth is very, very small. However, it basically enables a neighborhood or a community network. And again, there's some great benefits here because if you have, let's say, a dog tag and it has geolocation on it and your dog wanders off, you could query the network to find out where your dog is in the network. And that's kind of nice just by using everybody's Wi-Fi signal and communicating. But there's also potential risks for these types of services because, well, you're opening up your network under the control of Amazon, but you're opening it up to your neighbors. And that can bring inherent risks. First off, this is brand new. So it hasn't been rigorously tested by the security industry, security professionals to figure out, okay, how can you break it? How can you disable it? How can you, you know, misuse it? So there are risks. The second thing is you don't really know what traffic is gonna be coming from your neighbors, and do you really want that on your network? Again, don't really know, and only Amazon can really understand and configure what's going on here, but there are potential hacking risks or even malware, jailbreaking, things of that sort that could put your network and your devices at risk. The third thing is what information, what metadata is Amazon gleaning from this? Because again, Amazon likes to gather data about their customers to help provide and tailor services, but they're probably going to be gathering metadata about individual users and communities, and there's no real clear indication on what they're going to do. Are they gonna anonymize it? Can you opt out of it? And even more concerning here, is the notices that people are getting. They're informing customers this is getting turned on by default. Now wait a second here. Now as a security professional, I'm kind of concerned about this. Should Amazon be turning this on by default and potentially exposing their customers to more risks without their say? And there's a lot of customers out there that don't understand the risks. Heck, I don't understand the risks, right? It's not yet really kind of been tested out there. Should they— should everybody automatically be added into this? Did you sign up for this when you bought that Amazon product, that Echo or, or something else, your Ring, you know, video? This is concerning. Amazon, this should not be turned on by default. I think there's great potential here, but users should have the option. Companies shouldn't automatically by default turn and add new cyber risks to unsuspecting customers, customers who aren't going to read the notice, customers who aren't going to understand the potential ramifications. This should be an opt-in. Let's roll this out slowly. Let's test this. Let's see if it can get hacked or abused. Let's make sure that it's properly hardened before we turn everybody on. This undermines trust with your customers because if something bad does happen, they're gonna wonder, Amazon, why did you turn this on by default? So for those Amazon customers out there that do have those Ring devices or Echo devices, I would strongly recommend that you go into the settings and that you turn it off. When you get the notification, go in there, turn this off until you're prepared and you fully understand what the risks are. Then turn it on at your option, your choice, at a time of your choosing. So for right now, the recommendation is for Amazon Sidewalk, let it pass you by for the time being until it gets tested.
