Is Opening Up Amazon Sidewalk to Third-Party Developers Safe?

In an interesting development last week, Amazon announced that its opening up its sidewalk protocol to third-party developers. The collaboration was first quietly discussed in 2019, but it was not before June 2021 that the program was officially launched.

Now the question is, since Sidewalk powers thousands of devices for homeowners all across the USA, is it really safe to allow third-party developers to handle the technology?

How Does Amazon Sidewalk Work?

To understand how the new change might affect your privacy, it's important to understand how Sidewalk works. It uses smart home appliances such as Amazon Echo or Ring to create a mesh network so that your devices stay connected even when your Wi-Fi acts up, or they are farther away from the WiFi's range.

These home appliances act as network bridges that maintain the connectivity of multiple devices. Hence, the more bridges you have in your locality, the better connection you'll receive.

For example, if you want to install Ring lights on your driveway, you can connect them to the Sidewalk. This way, despite being far from your router, the lights will work just fine with WiFi.

Now, here's where the privacy concern comes in. A Sidewalk network has all the smart devices in your house connected, and all the data transferred between these devices is done through the network itself. This increases the chances of data leaks.

The forced opt-in wasn't well-received by the customers, which subsequently dampened Sidwalk's launch and acceptance.

So although there hasn't been any major security concern with Amazon Sidewalk after the minor initial concerns, it would be interesting to see if that remains the same after opening up the protocol to third parties.

The first concern users had with Amazon Sidewalk was that they were forced to opt in. Even for the old customers, an over-the-air update turned on the feature in all devices across the country.

But at the same time, Amazon also sent an email explaining how you can opt out of the service. This move, however, has received a fair share of criticism, considering not everyone checks all their emails. Also, the settings to turn it off have been quite hard to find in the Alexa app.

Do You Need To Be Concerned?

The only reason why Amazon is adding third-party developers to the protocol is to increase the number of Sidewalk-compatible devices. On top of that, these developers will also help identify bugs that in-house Amazon developers fail to fix. While the privacy protocols on paper look good so far, we are yet to see how things unfold later on.

It has not met with reality yet. When all of these things meet with reality, some problems surface.John Callas, director of public interest technology at the Electronic Frontier Foundation

For added protection, Sidewalk has been provided with multiple layers of encryption. Each developer will also be given unique identities to link devices to their apps to prevent unauthorized users from entering.

If you're still concerned about how safe it is, the best way is to opt out of the service.

For now, there's no major concern. It all depends on how comfortable you are with third parties accessing a network that has all the devices of your house connected together.

There have been a few times when Amazon has messed up. For instance, it doesn't have a service record for Amazon Ring Cameras and Surveillance. But on the brighter side, Amazon's AWS cloud services have never had any major security complaints.

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