I originally posted these thoughts on my LinkedIn profile but wanted to revisit here as well. It is not an in-depth technical analysis. Just a bit of a rant and declaration. A future post with more geeky thoughts is in order for sure.
First the announcement release about Amazon Sidewalk.
Amazon did discuss this before and I remember reading about it on Hacker News or some other aggregate site a few months ago. This is still a terrible, terrible idea and I'll definitely be making sure to disable anything that has Sidewalk implemented. Because rest assured that even though you did the right thing and didn't connect your SmartTV to your home network, Sidewalk will eventually make its way into non-Amazon made products and spread it. That's the goal and one can only imagine the impact of all those devices constantly chatting and sharing information. That's the real scary part.
It is my network. That I designed and paid for. It is my internet connection that I pay for. I do NOT want to share even a single packet of information on my network without my explicit permission. Creating this shadow network is complete and total bull crap. And in a month of usage the release above says it is capped aet 500MB. It shouldn't even be a single byte!
Shame on you Amazon!
And this is exactly why I'm tossing out my Alexa and building my own voice assistant where I own all the data. So look out for another experiment soon. This now bumps up in priority. :)