There's a very real difference in that Apple's Find My is using Bluetooth LE and pinging a location/identifier string back to iCloud. Sidewalk literally takes over a slice of your Wifi and shares it with devices that aren't even in your home. Your neighbor's Ring cam could be permanently on your WiFi connection without your knowledge or consent. They should at least ask.

I don't think SideWalk is for high bandwidth audio/video communication. It uses LoRa for communication, which tops out at 27 kbps, and usually no where near that.

I'm expecting both systems transmit well under 50 MB/month. They use fundamentally alike premises. Find My also literally takes over a slice of your wifi & share info on gobs of devices it sees. That there is less user interaction with Find My does not make me- like it seems to make you- feel much better about the situation. But it also ought be a relatively negligible amount of throughput

Alas, as usual, these cloud-run devices seem to offer no visibility, no way to see or understand what devices we "own" are doing, gives us no grasp on how they are behaving.

In that sense, Find My takes "a slice of your Wifi" (or even mobile data) as well.

There isn't a qualitative difference between the two in my view (there might be a quantitative one – Sidewalk's data cap is 80 kbit/s or 500 MB per month; Apple isn't publishing this data, but I'd expect it to be lower, although not limited to wi-fi and also using battery power).

and the iPhone's battery

I'm confused how my neighbors devices would be connecting to my secured WiFi network without my knowledge. Is that correct?

Your smart speaker connects to your wifi AP and acts as a node in the Sidewalk mesh network. Your neighbour's Ring device connects to your speaker through Sidewalk and uses it as an exit point. The good thing is that 900 MHz narrowband has a 400 ms on air time limitation.

That’s not true. From Amazon:

The maximum bandwidth of a Sidewalk Bridge to the Sidewalk server is 80Kbps, which is about 1/40th of the bandwidth used to stream a typical high definition video. Today, when you share your Bridge’s connection with Sidewalk, total monthly data used by Sidewalk, per account, is capped at 500MB, which is equivalent to streaming about 10 minutes of high definition video

all these limits could be changed at amazon’s discretion

LoRa isn’t capable of having the kind of bandwidth to support video so no, they can’t

*Amazon Ring. If they don't have to ask to make the mesh in the first place, why will they ask for, use by themselves, permission to use their mesh to further entrench their business and cut out other competitors.

I think this comes down to an amount of perceived bad faith. Amazon’s goal, like Facebook and Google, is to collect as much as it can about everyone to sell more things. That makes anything like this feel nefarious.

Apple of course wants to sell you all the things, but they put privacy first, at least publicly, and don’t collect this information in order to do so.

How much is perception vs. reality? Not sure. But it doesn’t really matter.

Right. The reality is Apple's stance on privacy just so happens to align with their business interests at this time, whereas Amazon's does not.

You say that like it’s a bad thing (and if their business interests change, it will be) but I trust a corporation to follow its business interests much more than I trust one to act ideologically and to its own detriment. So for now, at least, that makes Apple’s privacy claims more credible.

Apple's marketing, which constantly gets shit on by tech professionals, does work. Those guys need a raise. Apple, Google & Amazon are equally invasive, all track usage in apps and websites on their devices, but Apple gets a free pass.

It honestly just strikes me as one gets way more favorable press coverage and everyone is swayed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_distortion_field

Apple makes the bulk of their money from devices, Google from selling your data. I don't see how you can't see the difference. Sure, Apple is not pure, but their ad revenue is like 1 billion dollars (out of 272), compared to 80% out of 196 for Google.

It's because Google and Facebook do much worse things, and Apple is shouting: "We don't do these (specific) terrible things!"

This is really an excellent marketing strategy. Ask anyone and they'll tell you that Facebook is trying to sell your data and Apple is a privacy-focused company.

G&F do worse things?

- As far as I can tell, Apple still has extensive analytics about App Store usage, iOS usage. Google does too, but they aren't pretending Android is private, just private from anybody not called Google.

- That data is considered "first party" so Apple gets a massive exception when it comes to running targeted advertisements. iAd 2 could be just round the corner, and after crippling AdMob and FB it's highly likely it will be more profitable this time.

- Anything in iCloud (files, photos, text messages, browsing history) is accessible to law enforcement. Apple China keeps their encryption keys on the mainland.

It’s bad faith to call them “equally invasive”, if you take the time to understand how Airtags actually work and compare them to Sidewalk.

They’re not the same, but I’m more curious how you managed to miss the pages of outraged comments here on every thread pertaining to AirTags (for extra fun you can also check the outrage in the thread where Apple announced they were giving higher quality music to subscribers for free).

Shit, this is a thread about Amazon and Apple are still getting flack somehow.

Isn't that locked down through iCloud?

Find My is not enabled by default

Not correct. “Find My network” is very much on by default.

It also does much, much less than Sidewalk.

My understanding is that it is on by default if you use it. If you haven’t enabled Find My $device it is _not_ turned on by default.

Of course that isn’t much of a distinction since the vast majority of iPhone users will have Find My Phone turned on and I believe are encouraged to turn Find My Phone on during device setup.

I stand corrected. Just turned off “Find My iPad” and the switch for “Find My network” disappears. So I guess it’s “opt-out of this if you’ve opted in to that”? Regardless you are right, thanks.

This is my understanding too, it isn't immediately clear so I understand the confusion but if you do not onboard your device into the network on setup, you won't be pinging other devices (like AirTags) via ULB Bluetooth

Anyone know if it is possible to use airtags without an iPhone? I am interested in getting general location information of a tag, say within a few hundred meters.

I’ve researched this for probably the same reason. The simple answer is „no“. As far as I know you can locate an AirTag through the Find My-App on a Mac, but you can’t add one to your account.

Retrieval of the data from Apple requires an iCloud account and the keys required to decrypt it is stored in the key storage of your iDevices.

By my knowledge it seems to be theoretically possible to use the network with no iDevice and a bunch of faking, but I think it hasn’t been done so far.

For work around the network you may be interested in OpenHaystack (custom trackers and client, https://github.com/seemoo-lab/openhaystack) and Send My (custom messages over the network utilizing OpenHaystack, https://github.com/positive-security/send-my).

It’s not possible, although they can be reprogrammed so perhaps in the future someone will write a custom firmware.

I am trusting more the apple than the amazon. Former is having privacy as key of brand image, so not in interest for to violate privatcy. I am also still not use the apple track tag but am understanding why there exist more trust for these.

WTF is with this Borat-level parody of "bad English"? That's not how people actually sound when English is their second language, and you didn't sound like that two months ago. What's with the act?

(Sorry, mods, for the unrelated thread. It's just so weird.)

Wow that is really interesting. This person was writing regular, fluent sounding English sentences and then around 73 days ago they switched over to writing like this. I agree, it's very strange.

It in the past was from another user of site, he was desiring a new name and gave to me the old. In this way I am able to use down vote with no wait.

Almost as if they had a Kevin moment from The Office thinking it's somehow more efficient to communicate this way.

Account was not mine in past, given by friend. Please focusing on my comment substence only not on phraseic dificulty