The tech giant has been touting the technology’s ability to keep your security camera or smart speaker online even when the rest of your devices are offline. Privacy experts, however, have raised legitimate concerns, and the fact that Sidewalk can share part of your internet connection with your neighbors may be at least a little unnerving. Whether or not to use Sidewalk is your call, once you understand exactly what it is. If you already know what you want to do, you can skip right to the how-to. It also extends the reach of your network: Even if your Wi-Fi router can’t cast its signal to the bottom of the garden where your Ring camera is, an Echo speaker can bridge the gap and make sure everything stays online. In this way it’s similar to a mesh network that uses multiple router nodes around your home. However, Sidewalk extends this mesh to your neighbors’ homes as well. If the Wi-Fi goes down in the apartment next to yours, the smart speakers inside it could use Sidewalk to get online through your router instead, and vice versa—theoretically making everyone’s smart homes more reliable. It can only link up if you’re both using Sidewalk, though, so you won’t get many benefits if you’re the only person in your area with the system enabled. The reason for that “perhaps” is that no network can ever be 100 percent secure, as new exploits and vulnerabilities are discovered all the time. Having your smart home devices connected to a neighborhood scheme is inherently less secure than keeping them to yourself—that’s no slight on Sidewalk’s security measures, that’s just the nature of networking. For example, connecting to the internet and opening email is risky, but we all do it. You’ll need to ask yourself whether you’re willing to live with the chance that a Sidewalk breach might happen in return for having a better chance of finding a lost pet or being able to keep your home security camera online if your router dies.
