AWS Sidewalk Flashcards
Amazon Sidewalk is
a shared network designed to help customer devices work better, both at home and beyond the front door.
Who operates AWS Sidewalk?
Operated by Amazon
Is there a charge to AWS Sidewalk?
No
What does Sidewalk do?
1) helps simplify new device setup,
2) extends the working range of low-bandwidth devices, and
3) helps devices stay online, even if they are outside the range of the user’s home wifi.
Sidewalk Architecture
1) Sidewalk Gateways
2) Sidewalk Endpoints
3) Sidewalk Network Server (or SNS)
4) Application Servers
5) Packets (also known as Messages)
Ring has faced near-constant (and usually deserved) criticism for its security and police partnership policies, which
facilitated video sharing between video doorbell owners and criminal investigators without the use of warrants.
,
systematically improved its security, most notably requiring two-factor authentication for user log-in and implementing end-to-end video encryption, to make their devices more resistant to hackers.
Perhaps most significantly, Ring no longer allows police departments to contact its customers to ask for footage pertinent to active investigations. Instead, police can post “Requests for Assistance” on Ring’s Neighbors app timeline, which gives users a public forum for freely commenting on the requests. A “Tap here to help” button will also let Ring customers in the immediate vicinity of the incident under investigation privately share footage with police. (Ring will share information including your name, home address and email with the police if you use this option.)
Ring users can opt out of seeing these requests or receiving notifications that they’ve been posted.
that Ring devices are slowly transforming public space into surveilled space and allowing Ring owners
to decide on behalf of their whole neighborhood to share their recordings of that public space with police.
Ring Police Problem?
Starting in 2018, Ring started reaching out to police departments across the country. To date, the company has partnered with 1,771 departments. These relationships positioned Ring as a mediator between its customers and law enforcement agencies – a powerful position considering Ring leads the market for video doorbells with an 18% share after selling 1.4 million doorbells in 2020, according to research firm Strategy Analytics. No. 2 ranked SkyBell sold about 800,000.
In the past, officers leading criminal investigations could submit a request form to Ring through the Neighbors Public Security Service tool, which had to include a case number and specific suspected crime. Officers could ask for up to 12 hours of footage from devices within half a mile of the incident.
A team of Ring-employed monitors who had undergone a six-week training period would then review requests to make sure they adhered to these guidelines. (Ring monitors would reject a request, for example, if police requested 24 hours of footage.) If the monitors accepted the request, Ring would send the request for video to the appropriate customers, if there were any in the area. If there weren’t any users nearby, Ring would not notify the investigators, so as not to encourage them to resubmit with new parameters. The emails Ring did send informed customers of their rights not to share footage with police, but also provided a link to do so.
