I was looking at our Cybersecurity update at work today and I came across Amazon Sidewalk. I saw one person mention it once on here. For your situational awareness, It went into effect June 8th
On June 8, the Web host merchant and entertainment behemoth automatically enrolled Alexa, Echo, or many other Amazon devices into Amazon Sidewalk. The new wireless mesh service will share a small slice of your Internet bandwidth with neighboring Sidewalk-capable devices that don’t have connectivity. Sidewalk will also help your Amazon devices with bandwidth from other Sidewalk users when you don’t have a connection.
By default, a variety of Amazon devices will enroll in the system come June 8 and only a tiny fraction of people know to take the time to change default settings. This means that millions of people will be co-opted into the program, whether they know anything about it or not.
Amazon states that Sidewalk “is currently only available in the US.”
The full list of devices that can act as Sidewalk bridges is Ring Floodlight Cam (2019), Ring Spotlight Cam Wired (2019), Ring Spotlight Cam Mount (2019), Echo (3rd gen and newer), Echo Dot (3rd gen and newer), Echo Dot for Kids (3rd gen and newer), Echo Dot with Clock (3rd gen and newer), Echo Plus (all generations), Echo Show (all models and generations), Echo Spot, Echo Studio, Echo Input, and Echo Flex.
Ways to Protect Yourself · Turn off Amazon Sidewalk · Open the Alexa mobile app. · Go to “More” in the bottom right corner. · Navigate to Settings > Account Settings and tap Amazon Sidewalk. · Scroll to the bottom of the Amazon Sidewalk page and tap the toggle bar to turn off the feature
From Amazon “the sidewalk server is 80Kbps…Monthly data used by Sidewalk, per account, is capped at 500MB”
The more you know…