If you have an Amazon Echo or Ring device, there is a good chance that Amazon is sharing a little slice of your Internet connection with your neighbours, without you even realising.
The feature is called Amazon Sidewalk and was announced by Amazon a while back in an email notification.
The idea behind it is to create community “mesh networks” using Echo/Ring devices that can combine a small piece of everyone’s home Wi-Fi to extend it to the immediate community (i.e. your neighborhood) in order to allow compatible devices to receive Internet access within the area when they would normally be out-of-range. And Echo and Ring owners in the US have been opted in automatically.
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Such compatible devices that can receive this extended shared Internet include smart-locks and Tile trackers to help you find lost keys, and that list of compatible devices is likely to grow.
These devices, if they fall out of range of traditional home Wi-Fi, can connect to the network exuded by Amazon Sidewalk devices in proximity.
It doesn’t appear – at least at this early stage – that the technology could open the gates to data thieves or cybercrooks. But it’s a new technology in a world that too often responds reactively instead of pre-emptively against cybercrime. And given the nature of how Amazon enabled the feature (opt-in instead of opt-out) it’s likely that many will prefer to err on the side of disabling it.
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So if you want to disable it for Echo devices, open the Alexa app, click the More option, then Settings, then Account Settings, then Amazon Sidewalk and choose Disable.
For Ring devices, open the Ring app, select the three lined icon, then Control Center, then Amazon Sidewalk and choose the Disable option.
The service is live in the United States with no current plans to extend it anywhere else. (So if you’re outside the United States reading this, there’s nothing you need to worry about yet.)