Owners of Amazon Echo assistants and Ring doorbells have until June 8 to avoid automatically opting into Sidewalk, the internet giant's mesh network that taps into people's broadband and may prove to be a privacy nightmare.
The idea is that if, for instance, your internet connection goes down or is interrupted, your Amazon smart home devices will still be able to communicate with the outside world, and send out alerts or take instructions, by wirelessly connecting to neighbors' Sidewalk-compatible gadgets and using their internet connection instead.
These Sidewalk gizmos communicate with one another using Bluetooth Low Energy over short distances and 900MHz LoRa over longer ranges, and use Wi-Fi to reach the public internet and Amazon's backend servers.
