Smart-home devices are more than they seem

Amazon Echo speakers and Ring security cameras will begin to share your Internet connection with neighbours on Tuesday, but does Big Tech deserve our trust?

Jun 10, 2021

Modern democratic society is based largely on trust. Trust in the honour system, for example, that non-vaccinated people will wear masks in indoor spaces. Trust in our government, that we should wear masks in the first place. And trust in billionaire tech giants like Jeff Bezoz’s Amazon, that we should give up increasing amounts of our money and data in exchange for added comfort.

Part of that trust — or ignorance — is what led millions of people to purchase smart-home devices such as Amazon Echo speakers or the Google or Apple equivalent. It’s what led us to buy these smart-home devices that make it a little easier to play a song or buy a piece of cheese without having to move. But the thing about trust is that it requires transparency, at least in theory. With Big Tech, however, there has never been any transparency when it comes to what else these devices are capable of, what else they do with our data, what other motives companies like Amazon have for putting this hardware inside of our homes.

Well, we finally have part of the answer. Amazon Echo devices and Ring security cameras (owned by Amazon) have within them a hidden type of technology with the ability to create a new kind of wireless network called Sidewalk, which shares a slice of your home internet connection with your neighbours’ devices. Sidewalk has been lying dormant inside Amazon devices dating back to 2018, and on Tuesday, Amazon is switching Sidewalk on… for everybody.

In short, Sidewalk works by transforming your smart device into a so-called Sidewalk Bridge that uses your home’s private internet connection to create a new network of its own. While it’s not quite WiFi, it uses common Bluetooth to connect devices nearby and another type of signal (using the 900 MHz spectrum) to connect to devices up to half a mile away, creating a wider area of connection for these devices to work on. But Sidewalk authorizes your Echo/Ring to share a portion of your home’s Internet bandwidth — up to 500 megabytes per month — which could count toward your internet service provider’s data cap if you’ve got one. The bill will be paid by you, not Amazon, even though it’s conceivable that Amazon will use Sidewalk for its own business, such as to track packages or connect its delivery trucks.

Now, it’s possible to opt-out of Sidewalk, and I would recommend doing so at least until we have some more answers about it’s security and surveillance capabilities, for starters. But this leads to a larger question about trust, specifically with regards technology in modern society: Why do we trust these institutions that have given us every reason to be skeptical of them and very few reasons to think that they have our best interests in mind?

Roughly a quarter of American homes have smart-home devices such as Amazon Echo. Maybe it’s because we are willfully ignorant, but I think it’s more likely that a lot of us know that these devices come with potential hidden dangers and just don’t care. Or maybe we do care but think that the pros — having a cheap speaker that one can speak to or a security camera to watch your door from your phone — outweigh the potential cons. But when it comes to technology, we tend to spend a lot more time thinking about the pros than the cons, and I think that as we learn more about the hidden capabilities of these devices, we might realize that the pros hardly outweigh anything.

For starters, Amazon is not asking you to opt-in to Sidewalk. It is automatically turning it on and, for whatever reason, not being transparent about what their future plans for the project are. But it’s safe to assume that a company as large as Amazon has lofty goals and, for starters, is creating a large wireless network to gather even more data about consumers, which it will use to advertise to us and sell to third-party sites.

More than that, Sidewalk will allow people and organizations to put Ring devices in places that weren’t possible before, massively increasing the reach of Amazon’s thriving but controversial Ring security business, which has cooperative agreements with more than 2,000 police and fire departments across the U.S. and which police forces tapped for more than 20,000 requests for footage in 2020, including videos from Ring owners in view of the Los Angeles’ Black Lives Matter protests last summer.

“It is slowly eliminating the notion of ‘off-the-grid,’ ” says Matthew Guariglia, a policy analyst at the tech-liberties-focused Electronic Frontier Foundation. “As long as Amazon is storing all that data … all of that can be accessible to police. It’s impossible to think of things as just private or public surveillance anymore.”

That’s not to say that crime is okay or that we shouldn’t be aiming to crack down on it, but just like how Big Tech has given us every reason to distrust them, the police here in Canada and the United States have given us even more reasons to distrust them, and the same goes for the FBI and CSIS. As we know, this type of surveillance technology disproportionately affects minority groups and low-income people, who are already incarcerated at extremely high rates.

The more we put this type of technology into our homes, allowing them to create a larger surveillance network, the more we willingly give power to the police and aid in turning our society into more of a police state. Furthermore, the more the police work with companies like Amazon, the more power Big Tech will have over decision-making at the federal level.

And then there are the security risks. While Amazon says that Sidewalk is built with three layers of encryption so that nobody can view the raw data passing through it, there have been too many security issues with Amazon’s smart-home devices to trust that they have it all under control. For starters, while Amazon’s Alexa (the software within the Echo devices) only pertains records your voice once you wake it up, the technology is still deeply imperfect, as a Bloomberg study revealed that Alexa woke up “accidentally” in more than one out of 10 transcripts analyzed. Plus, Amazon Alexa recordings have started showing up in court and being used against people in criminal proceedings, even though the recordings were taken from a device they bought within the privacy of your own homes.

After seeing recordings show up in court and the FBI refusing to confirm or deny if they were using Alexa for surveillance, the Gizmodo editor Adam Clark Estes claims that “It became increasingly clear to me that the privacy watchdogs were right. It is, at base, a wiretapping device.”

“The only truly effective power you can wield over this technology is not to use it,” Estes says. “But making an informed choice is compromised by misleading marketing and undermined by Amazon’s efforts to embed Alexa into countless products, including cars, televisions, headphones, microwaves, thermostats and clocks, while signing deals with housebuilding companies and hotel chains, all with an eye to becoming the One Voice.”

The One Voice is a term Shoshana Zuboff uses in her groundbreaking book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, where she writes, “In this future [of smart-home devices], children learn the principles of the One Voice—a run time, a new interface. It is available everywhere to execute their commands, anticipate their desires, and shape their possibilities. The omnipresence of the One Voice, with its fractious, eager marketplace-of-you concealed under its skirts, changes many things. Intimacy as we have known it is compromised, if not eliminated. Solitude is deleted. The children will learn fast that there are no boundaries between self and the market. Later they will wonder how it could ever have been different.”

Sure, that’s an extreme outlook, but we can’t dismiss the possibility that smart-home devices have the capability to transform modern society without us ever giving them explicit consent. Dismissing that would mean putting trust into Big Tech — and to some extent, the government — when both institutions have betrayed our trust time and again, failing to be adhere to security standards and surveilling us without ever saying a word.

As one unnamed executive who worked at Amazon and another big-five tech company put it: “They have zero interest, in my opinion, in wondering what the impact of those products will be. To treat them as the right people to wield that power is a ludicrous situation that we wouldn’t allow in any other industry. They, frankly, are not safe guardians of the data that they’re collecting every day without us knowing.”

It speaks to how misguided our trust is in these products that the people who work the closest to the tech industry are the ones saying that we should not only be wary of the technology, but also that these companies are lying to us and could have much bigger goals than simply figuring out what type of music we like. If that wasn’t clear by now, it should be on Tuesday, when Amazon will switch on Sidewalk in all Echo and Ring devices without our consent, creating an entirely new wireless network with considerable surveillance capabilities.

Notes:

Question (please respond in the comments)

If you have a smart-home device inside your home, did you think about the pros and cons before? Or are you only learning about the potential risks now?

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