Security News > 2021 > June > Your Amazon Devices to Automatically Share Your Wi-Fi With Neighbors
Starting June 8, Amazon will automatically enable a feature on its family of hardware devices, including Echo speakers, Ring Video Doorbells, Ring Floodlight Cams, and Ring Spotlight Cams, that will share a small part of your Internet bandwidth with nearby neighbors - unless you choose to opt-out.
Originally announced in September 2019, Sidewalk is part of Amazon's efforts to build a long-range wireless network that leverages a combination of Bluetooth and 900 MHz spectrum to help Echo, Ring, Tile trackers, and other Sidewalk-enabled devices communicate over the internet without Wi-Fi. Sidewalk is designed to extend the working range of low-bandwidth devices, and help devices stay connected even if they are outside the range of a user's home Wi-Fi network.
By flipping the switch on Sidewalk in the U.S. for all capable devices by default, the idea is to co-opt millions of smart home devices into the network and provide near-ubiquitous connectivity out of the range of a standard Wi-Fi network.
Elaborating on the protections baked into Sidewalk, the retail and entertainment behemoth said that packets traversing through the network are secured by three layers of encryption, and that it has safeguards in place to prevent unauthorized devices from joining by using Sidewalk credentials created during device registration process to authenticate their identities.
"Sidewalk protects customer privacy by limiting the amount and type of metadata that Amazon needs to receive from Sidewalk endpoints to manage the network," the company said in a white paper, while stressing that Sidewalk has been implemented with security protocols to prevent disclosure of private information and any commands that may be transmitted over the network.
"The routing information that Amazon does receive for operating the network components of Sidewalk is automatically cleared every 24 hours," it added.