Amazon Wants to Connect Your Smart Speaker and Doorbell With Your Neighbor’s. It’s Actually Pretty Cool!
When I was in graduate school, in the early 2010s, mesh networks were in vogue. Mesh networks are decentralized networks of computer devices that are able to pass online traffic between them without each having to be connected to an internet service provider, and researchers have suggested they might be an important and useful way of, for instance, establishing ad hoc local networks in the aftermath of natural disasters: Instead of having to connect to Comcast you just connect to the other nearby devices. Famously, in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, mesh networks took off in some communities struggling to recover.
I’m used to hearing mesh networks described in positive terms, as a way to expand online connectivity and provide service in difficult-to-reach places at critical moments. So I was struck by the backlash against Amazon’s recently announced plans in late May to test run a mesh network among users of its Echo speaker and Ring security camera devices in the United States. Amazon Sidewalk, as the company has dubbed the proposal, will connect Ring and Echo devices across homes (and Wi-Fi networks) so that they can borrow internet access from one another. In other words, if you’re setting up a Ring camera on your porch and it’s a little outside the range of your home network, you could potentially connect to your neighbor’s network (if they also have an Amazon device) and borrow a little bit of their bandwidth and connectivity, as needed.
To be clear, that doesn’t mean your neighbors have access to your entire home network or the data being collected by your Amazon devices—it just means they may be able to piggyback off your internet connection occasionally. In fact, Amazon published a white paper that describes all the privacy protections put in place to make sure that different households’ data don’t end up being accessible to one another in any way. Perhaps you simply don’t trust Amazon as a company to implement the technical architecture they describe in that paper, but in that case you probably shouldn’t be buying their devices and trusting them with audio and video recordings in the first place. And from a technical standpoint, Amazon has been very solid when it comes to security protections for devices and data.