Privacy Pinpoint: Amazon Sidewalk program
Amazon released a new program on June 8th that they call "Amazon Sidewalk". Amazon automatically enrolled its devices (read your devices that you purchased with your hard earned money) in the program. Sidewalk is a new wireless mesh network service that will share (read siphon or steal) a slice of your internet connection/bandwidth with nearby neighbors/people who do not have connectivity. Any of their lights, echo devices, Alexa devices, security cameras, motion detectors, or tile trackers will have this service turned on by default. This is a major issue for a few reasons: Firstly, the vast majority of people just plug these devices in and use them without changing any of the default credentials, altering any of the privacy settings (none of these devices should be in your home if you're even a tiny bit privacy conscious anyway, but we digress), or changing any of the settings at all. Secondly, most people don't pay attention enough to their technology to even know that this service exists and will be turned on without their knowledge or consent. This service is "free of charge", though admittedly it will be siphoning your internet connection (which you pay for) and allowing others to use it free of charge. These devices are already majorly invasive with regards to privacy and security, but now they also steal not just your information, your data, and share/sell it for personal gain...they steal your internet connection to strengthen their platform/brand, too. There are plenty of reasons not to buy these types of devices. This is just one more.
In the name of convenience, people have Amazon devices that step over the line (of someone's reasonable need for privacy) all over their homes, and most don't even know what's happening under the hood. These devices are vacuuming your information as fast as you can produce it.
This doesn't seem troubling to many people for some reason, but this data is used against us every single day. Heat maps of where we go, who we see, what we do. Data points on your political beliefs are being used to change outcomes of elections (checkout the movie "The Great Hack" for the digested version). The time you spend looking at a photo on social media is used to see which content to feed you next (checkout the movie "The Social Dilemma") - all of these platforms fight for your attention and make lots of money doing it. They even use gambling methods to do so. Ring doorbell cameras, for example, connect to the cloud (Amazon servers), and store all of the stream data there. This means you have no control over the video content that is recorded in front of your own home - not to mention the fact that many of these cameras are running Rekognition which is essentially a deep learning/machine learning program that runs facial/object recognition on anyone or anything in the view of your camera - can anyone say police state or China. Oh yeah, they have also connected it to nearly 2000 police agencies/databases, and use it essentially for a new way for police to have footage in your neighborhood and allows them to use it without a need for a warrant. One of Amazon's own software engineers, Max Eliaser, even wrote a letter to management stating that Ring is “...simply not compatible with a free society”! The worst part is that this technology is being paid for and installed by consumers, willfully.
Amazon is not the only company doing these types of things. Companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Tiktok, Instagram (owned by Facebook) are all doing similar things with both their hardware and their software. These devices, this technology, they all have serious implications for human rights, privacy and freedom of expression. We need to wake up and take this seriously. These are only a few of the reasons that Nottingham Nerds believes so heavily in open source, in Linux as an operating system, in self-hosted (and other privacy respecting) software, and end-to-end encrypted services. We need to protect ourselves, and our familes from this nonsense.
If you want to hear it from the CEO of Altispeed Technologies, Noah Chelliah, a renowned member of the Linux community and podcast host on the Ask Noah Show and Destination Linux, he talks about many of these issues on the Ask Noah Show. On Episode 235, he dives in to Amazon Sidewalk (21:46-28:55).
Noah J. Chelliah