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You may have received an email from Amazon this week which, let’s face it, came across as equal parts exciting and terrifying.

“A new feature is launching on your Echo device: Amazon Sidewalk.” - exciting.

“Amazon Sidewalk is a shared network that helps devices work better.” - neutral.

“When enabled, Sidewalk uses a small portion of your Internet bandwidth to provide these services to you and your neighbors.” - terrifying.

Everyone likes new features, especially when they don’t have to pay for them. But you’d be forgiven for having reservations about a network run by Amazon that shares your bandwidth with complete strangers.

Here’s a quick overview of what you need to know about Sidewalk. You can then make your own mind up as to whether it’s for you or not.

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Before everyone gets their skivvies is a twist, this is very likely an Amazon precursor to what Apple will do with AirTags. Amazon Sidewalk is all about providing a very low cost, low bandwidth, highly distributed, mesh network (using BTLE and 900 MHz) for locating and discovering identification tags and exchanging a few bits of data with simple sensors . It uses a small slice of each participants' WiFi bandwidth (1/40th with a hard monthly cap) as a backhaul to bridge sensor/tag data up to the cloud through your WAN connection. By meshing together all of the participants' data feeds they can achieve area wide coverage, i.e., several square miles.

There's nothing inherently nefarious about what Amazon is doing, and if you don't like it, don't use it. When Apple rolls out their wide area coverage for AirTags you'll be able to decide whether you trust Apple more than you trust Amazon, and sign up with Apple to help facilitate the same sort of service. Or not. Nobody has to do anything they are not comfortable doing. Until we have some sort of third-party or governmental infrastructure in place to support these kinds of services, companies like Amazon, Apple, and Amazon (and others) will try to utilize whatever connectivity opportunities are available to them. Amazon Sidewalk is just the first of the opportunists to hot the street, or should I say, the sidewalk.

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Another way for Amazon to track and identify you. Groovy.