“What it really is, is a way to connect a bunch of devices together,” says Jon Callas, the director of technology products at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “It seems to be a way to do primarily two things: One being to help get a device up [and running] in a place where you might not have good Wi-Fi coverage.” For example, he speculates that a weather station at the edge of your own network might route data through your neighbor’s network. The second use case, he adds, is for doing tasks like helping to locate a Tile tracker that could be strapped onto one of your pets, or keys that you dropped somewhere. The bigger issue, as Callas sees it, is the fact that those Tile trackers join Sidewalk on June 14. As a Tile blog post puts it: “Now, eligible Echo Devices around the neighborhood connected to Sidewalk can help you find your Tiled items. These Echo devices can also securely scan for and update the location of Tiles using Sidewalk’s Bluetooth frequency. This expanded relationship will exponentially grow the already massive Tile Network, which means lost Tiles outside the home will receive more location updates more often, helping customers track them down faster.” That’s handy for people who drop their keys down the road from their house, but Callas sees room for abuse. Tile trackers already had some out-of-the-home functionality, but Sidewalk expands that, and making tiles easier to track down at greater distances could have a sinister downside. “What happens if somebody drops one of these in my bag?” Callas wonders. “That is what the real privacy issue that we see is, and it is something that they don’t address at all.” (Here’s how Apple’s AirTags handle the issue as well as more on the potential concerns when it comes to stalking.) So while the data and encryption protocol looks generally good to Callas, the bigger concern lies in how people may misuse trackers. “The open, scary question is: What happens when somebody wants to use this as a stalking system?”
