What it does is allow your devices to connect to your neighbor’s Wi-Fi, and to allow your neighbor’s devices to connect to yours – all without exchanging passwords.
All the same, I’d echo the ArsTechnica cautionary note.
Information customers would deem sensitive, like the contents of a packet sent over the Sidewalk network, is not seen by Sidewalk; only the intended destinations (the endpoint and application server) possess the keys required to access this information. Sidewalk’s design also ensures that owners of Sidewalk gateways do not have access to the contents of the packet from endpoints (they do not own) that use their bandwidth. Similarly, endpoint owners do not have access to gateway information. The Sidewalk Network Server continuously “rolls”, or changes transmission IDs (TX-ID) and Sidewalk Gateway IDs every 15 minutes to prevent tracking devices and associating a device to a specific user.
If you don’t, your devices will be automatically enrolled on June 8. At the time of writing, the feature is US-only, so no action is needed in other countries.
There are enough theoretical risks to give users pause. Wireless technologies like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth have a history of being insecure. Remember WEP, the encryption scheme that protected Wi-Fi traffic from being monitored by nearby parties? It was widely used for four years before researchers exposed flaws that made decrypting data relatively easy for attackers. WPA, the technology that replaced WEP, is much more robust, but it also has a checkered history […]
