Amazon and Apple are building rival networks that know where everything is

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/amazon-sidewalk-apple-u1-networks

by MilnerRoute • 7 years ago

187 83 7 years ago

wired.co.uk

I guess "quiet" is "Jeff Bezos bringing it up in an interview with reporters". Whereas "secretive" is "Google CEO confirms leaked documents are genuine in interview with reporters".

So "loud" must be buying ads in every TV slot, radio, and billboard so that nobody could possibly miss it.

I don't think it's fair to apply terms humans use to corporations.

OrgNet2• 7 years ago

I don't think it's fair to apply terms humans use to corporations.

... but corporations are people, according to the law.

(ie: you can't say someone said something just because someone else said it.)

saagarjha2• 7 years ago

Unfortunately the context of this conversation isn’t a courtroom.

JohnFen• 7 years ago

but corporations are people, according to the law.

Except that's not really what the law says (in the US, anyway).

GWSchulz• 7 years ago

Quietly my ass. Both are promoting it as a way to make an estate or corner of earth internet-connected, rather than just a single structure.

dang• 7 years ago

Ok, we've disquieted the title above.

Jun83• 7 years ago

Interesting bit:

"In its testing, though, [Amazon] sent out 700 gateway devices to Amazon employees in the Los Angeles basin, and because each one has a range of between 500m and up to a mile, Amazon was able to "basically cover where everyone lives in LA"

Whoa! Article also mentions the Ring ecosystem but this may have major impact on Amazon's home delivery bottleneck. I would totally buy a (cheap, small) personal lockerbox for my condo if it interfaces with Ring Bridge. AFAIK, they tested the apartment complex lockerbox idea some time ago but didn't take on. Maybe time for a retrial.

For Apple's ultrawideband, article focuses on in-home consumer but this has huge impact for enterprise, too. Many warehouse customers are looking into cheap ways for indoor locationing/tracking of assets, e.g. forklifts.

gnopgnip• 7 years ago

Amazon offers lockboxes for condos and apartments called amazon hub, it is on the order of $10k upfront for a 100 unit building, no ongoing cost.

Jun83• 7 years ago

Our building has 7 condos so this solution is an overkill. Yet, every day we have 4-5 boxes from Amazon laying around in the entrance of the building. Rarely, neighbors pick up the wrong package.

robszumski• 7 years ago

I wonder if it's even simpler than that. Use your door activity to guess when you will be home instead of missing deliveries. They could probably ship this functionality next week if they ignored privacy concerns.

notyourwork• 7 years ago

It’s not when to ship though, that’s a last mile problem which is much harder.

mulmen• 7 years ago

I’ll be home at 5:30 with everyone else. Good luck getting a delivery truck to my door at rush hour.

kaffeemitsahne• 7 years ago

"between 500m and up to a mile"

Nice combination of units.

axaxs• 7 years ago

Snark aside, I didn't realize this until you pointed it out. You made me realize that I subconsciously convert metric to imperial when reading, which I didn't know prior.

notJim• 7 years ago

Couldn't you buy a regular lockbox for your condo that doesn't involve being constantly surveilled by Jeff Bezos?

nihonde• 7 years ago

We have lockboxes in my building in Japan. They’re just part of the infrastructure of a high-end condo here. You tap your key to get in the lobby door. A chime and recorded voice tells you that a package is waiting. You tap your key again inside and the locker with your stuff pops open. The lockers range in size from small to quite large boxes.

These work with any delivery carrier, but I’m not sure how the delivery person enters the apartment number.

Jun83• 7 years ago

Yes, but then how will the Amazon (or FedEx/UPS/etc) delivery person put the package inside? There’s a business idea here in connecting their handhelds to the Lockerbie and apps on customer phones.

a3n2• 7 years ago

The regular post boxes at my last apartments had some extra large common boxes. The letter carrier would put your package in one of them, and the key in your mailbox. Done, and no surveillance, tech, tech backdoors or batteries/power.

bchanudet• 7 years ago

I think it's already too late for enterprise, those needing tracking of something, be it a forklift or a single person with a handheld computer/scanner, already found solutions for this.

Actually Zebra is already offering something in this direction[1], but if you don't need such precision or have way less budget, triangulation with WiFi access points is usually enough (and they're already there for providing network access to the devices).

Then only remains the consumer market, I don't know if it'll be as big as they think it is. But I suppose they already checked that.

[1] https://www.zebra.com/us/en/products/location-technologies/u...

dmix3• 7 years ago

capable of delivering thousands of tag blinks per second at up to 30 cm accuracy.

That's pretty useful technology regardless. Sounds like a lot of potential for innovation. Agreed re: consumers (likely) not finding much, but for business that's a big deal.

Especially it if becomes commoditized via smart phones and small devices. The niche advanced suppliers would still be serving the higher end of the market but the large tail will be low-tier devices.

Taniwha• 7 years ago

Of course Apple's "unlicensed 900MHz band" doesn't exist in ITU region 3 (here in NZ, and I suspect China too) the ISM band is used by cell companies ....

diegoholiveira• 7 years ago

This band is used here in Brazil too.

saagarjha2• 7 years ago

Isn’t it Amazon’s unlicensed 900MHz band?

AndrewKemendo• 7 years ago

And Google with their Visual Positioning System:

https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/02/using-global-localization-...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8mfQFGNdr8

nomel• 7 years ago

My prediction from 2008 finally came true: https://nomel-blog.tumblr.com/post/47669161/idea-picture-bas...

chinathrow• 7 years ago

Can anyone explain what the next play is here? Is it tracking of devices without being able to turn it off?

pkulak• 7 years ago

I assume it's being able to track an object, with extremely high precision, anywhere in the world (that's populated) without relying on a data or GPS network. That seems huge to me.

alanbernstein• 7 years ago

What is the problem with using GPS?

klodolph2• 7 years ago

It’s location accuracy improvements in urban and indoor areas, which is notoriously poor.

UWB is supposed to let you know how far away other devices are, and in what direction. This will let you e.g. find your device if you left it somewhere in your house, or give you an UI to Airdrop to someone next to you (rather than just showing everyone in range), etc. Other location services are supposed to let you navigate indoors.

I don’t think there’s really “the next play” as much as there’s a bunch of marginal improvements, and a bunch of people who hope that there will be some killer app for location services that they can dominate.

dillondoyle• 7 years ago

I can see a lot of value for big brands / retail, where location tracking via bluetooth etc already exists. Same with FB offline conversion tracking, walk into store after seeing an ad analytics etc.

And I think Apple envisions value when combined with AR

readams• 7 years ago

You can't turn off Apple's version of this already.

ozmbie• 7 years ago

Being able to track the location of objects (or other people) through walls, for displaying in AR glasses. That's my guess.

batrat• 7 years ago

Time to start making tin foil hats. They will sell like crazy. (looking for investors)

GhettoMaestro• 7 years ago

Also time to make those shape-shifting suits from A Scanner Darkly (reference being from the movie version - it actually isn't too bad if you have not seen it).

bookofjoe2• 7 years ago

it actually isn't too bad if you have not seen it

Does that mean it IS bad if you have seen it?

egypturnash• 7 years ago

The scramble suits were straight out of the book.

Havoc• 7 years ago

Apples approach seems far superior. Medium range stuff tech is already out there. See z wave and zigbee. You can hack that stuff together without much cost.

Precise location indoors has no real equivalent currently

giancarlostoro• 7 years ago

Man I use the heck out of Z wave. Basically after buying my first home not too long ago I noticed the alarm system could update the weather without wifi... It intrigued me so I looked into it and sure enough its all z wave.

I bought a USB adapter for my Raspberry Pi 3 and installed OpenHAB on it. I can now control my thermostats (I have 2 AC units) from a web UI. Who needs a NEST? And its in other things too.

As for tracking... It depends on what I want to track but with a couple Raspberry Pi Zero Ws you can probably hunt down specific devices around the home if they have bluetooth / wifi. Whatever Pi has it closest to it is the one you wanna search near. Not sure if bluetooth can tell you signal strength but I am pretty sure wifi does since you see the signal bars. Those come from somewhere.

spydum• 7 years ago

for what it's worth, signal strength is not usually a great indicator of distance. I would think some sort of beacon/latency measurement would be far more robust way to measure relative distance?

bookofjoe2• 7 years ago

What? No Microsoft? They could call it "the internet of Bing"

jedberg2• 7 years ago

I hope Apple’s is better than what they have now. I lost my AirPods and used Find My to find them, and the “last location” wasn’t even the last time I used them! It can’t even keep track of a device actively connected to my phone. I only found them because I happen to sit on them.

r00fus• 7 years ago

The only use for Find My for Airpods I’ve seen is the ability to have either earpiece emit a chirping sound. The current location tracking is limited I think for battery life preservation - I also find that inaccurate.

glouwbug• 7 years ago

Maybe the battery died and someone moved your airpods

jedberg2• 7 years ago

No they fell out of my pocket. After I found them I knew exactly when I lost them — when I got out of the chair. And either way it should have at least registered the last time I used them.

The last know location was from two days before I lost them.

gnicholas• 7 years ago

Whenever I lose my AirPods, they're always in the charging case. In this state, you cannot trigger them to play a sound. Can't wait for tech to roll out that will help me find them in seconds instead of days.

pfranz2• 7 years ago

My current solution is to get a case for the charging case with a keyring and attach a Tile--but I'd much prefer something integrated and slimmer.

Razengan2• 7 years ago

Going on kind of a tangent here, but a thought has been creeping up on me that I can't wait to talk about:

I'm a major Apple fan, with several Apple devices that I use all the time, and while they have a strong pro-privacy stance for now (though we only have their word), Apple's ability to spy on me, should they ever want to, probably goes far beyond any other company.

Besides the usual "boring" methods like keylogging and microphone eavesdropping, which any company can do to the users of their OSes if they wanted to, the iPhone sees my face a hundred times a day, the Mac has my fingerprints, and the Watch knows how I'm moving and feeling (sitting, walking, excited, lethargic), and they can use that to infer what I'm doing or even about to do...

Has anyone thoroughly monitored and logged what these devices are sending out?

antipaul• 7 years ago

The risk is too high for them to fuck up, IMHO.

If someone found nefarious stuff after throughly logging and monitoring these devices, and their findings were made public, I think this would be too huge for a company which differentiates itself via their privacy stance

ctchocula• 7 years ago

I would contend that only a small subset of Apple's customers care about privacy, who are usually those working in tech. For most Apple fanboys, I'd say it's the aesthetic appeal, "cool" factor and conspicuous consumption that drives them to buy Apple. Even if someone found nefarious stuff, it would be in the media for one week and hardly anyone would notice.

m463• 7 years ago

The problem is that they deal themselves into the equation too much.

You can turn off bluetooth, but if you turn it on to talk to your headphones or car, you get opted-in to ibeacon location services.

You can turn off wifi, but if you turn it on to talk to your home router, yeah, more location services opt-in.

If you follow links in email or safari, with deep links apps on your phone that have registered can intercept them. there's no opt-out of this added functionality.

You text a link to someone, you also load a preview in imessage and therefore contact the site.

It's like normal functionality have all these built-in compromises you can't turn off.

Now with the UWB stuff, there isn't even an off switch.

I think their standard way of dealing with things is that they just shut up and don't advertise this stuff.

machello13• 7 years ago

You can turn off bluetooth, but if you turn it on to talk to your headphones or car, you get opted-in to ibeacon location services.
You can turn off wifi, but if you turn it on to talk to your home router, yeah, more location services opt-in.

Are these true? Bluetooth iBeacons, from what I understand, are now restricted by each app's Bluetooth access in iOS 13. And for Wifi, can't you just disable location services in Privacy settings?

andrepd2• 7 years ago

while they have a strong pro-privacy stance for now (though we only have their word)

So you have nothing. Nothing concrete at all. You have a black box on your hands, running whatever code Apple desires, effectively an infinite-privilege backdoor, with acessos to loads of data, with no possibility of scrutiny or verifiable privacy. Oh but you have their word. Come on...

Vinnl2• 7 years ago

As long as they're making it a selling point and a marketing message, they have incentive to stick to their word.

puranjay2• 7 years ago

I would suggest taking off the watch before starting a revolution or committing a crime.

nixpulvis• 7 years ago

What if taking off the watch is a crime.

Think I'm crazy... imagine the watch being confused, and calling 911 repeatedly. Best to destroy it, or at least kill its life somehow.

jpalomaki• 7 years ago

Find my iPhone, find my friends and Tile provide a lot value to our family every day.

Really waiting for the Apple branded products. While I’m quite happy with the tile, it would be convenient to have all i devices scanning for my lost stuff. Also being able to see the more exact location inside house would be great.

edf13• 7 years ago

iOS13 update... now Facebook messenger, G Maps, various others all requesting access to Bluetooth so they can "look for devices near to me".

This is the map that they are all building.

Amazon and Apple are building rival networks that know where everything is

Related Stories