Starting on June 8th, Amazon recently announced they would enable their “mesh” network, Sidewalk. This is essentially a bridge network between Echo devices, their owners’ home WiFi, and neighboring Echo devices.
This facilitates connections between smart home devices or other WiFi capable devices, like security cameras. This way if a device is far away from a WiFi access point, but close to an Echo device, it can still connect to the network.
Other people’s devices, like a neighbor’s, could also connect to your Sidewalk network and use a small portion of your bandwidth.
Amazon assures that Sidewalk uses multiple players of security to protect customer privacy. Customers should not be able to view other people’s information. Still, users are welcome opt-out from this feature. However, it is enabled by default.
Sidewalk is enabled by default on capable Amazon devices, such as Echo. Customers will need to opt-out to disable the Sidewalk network. To do this, from the Alexa App, tap on the “More” tab, then select Settings > Account Settings > Amazon Sidewalk, and toggle the “Enable” switch to the disabled setting.
Read more at Inc.com.