Have you heard of Amazon Sidewalk? Probably not. But there is a good chance that you or someone you know has an Amazon Echo or Ring camera. And if you own one of those devices and live in the U.S. (or know someone who does), you need to tell them to opt-out of the service as soon as possible.

What is Amazon Sidewalk? The feature was quietly announced late last year and again at this year’s fall hardware event. In a nutshell, it’s a sort of secondary, shared network for certain connected Amazon devices. The idea is it uses Echo and Ring devices as a bridge to extend connectivity over longer distances. So, say your internet goes down and thus renders your outdoor Ring security camera useless. Not an issue with Sidewalk—you can just tap into a neighbor’s Echo or Ring device. Because, oh yeah, Sidewalk pilfers a small portion of your bandwidth that then gets lumped together with other Echo and Ring devices in your vicinity to create this separate network. In total, Amazon says that the monthly data it will “borrow” is capped at 500 MB, or roughly the equivalent of streaming 10 minutes of high definition video.

read  more: https://gizmodo.com/you-need-to-opt-out-of-amazon-sidewalk-1845750268