Amazon purchases Eero

Good to know. I managed a UniFi network for my previous employer and found it to be very reliable.

It was for the personal use of our employees (WiFi access was not permitted on our work network). Support was limited to giving the current WiFi password to our employees and monitoring the system.

I have a first gen eero and have been planning to expand the system. Might be time for a change.

I think there is a big difference between a company like Facebook and Amazon in that Amazon is at least selling products. I can’t think of that much stuff with Amazon that is actually 100% free. It all requires me to buy an actual product or piece of hardware to use their services. Honestly if you have a grocery store rewards card to get sales prices and you’re ok with that I don’t see how you can act like Amazon is any different than that. It’s not like Apple is immune to gather data on you to give customers a better service.

I think the difference is, in this specific instance, that the grocery loyalty card tracks everything you buy at that grocery store, but not anywhere else. Amazing have their nose in your router allows them to potentially see everything you do on your wireless network and the internet at large.

You might be okay with the grocer tracking what you buy with them, but you probably wouldn’t be okay with them following you to your bank, your doctor’s appointment, and on your date. This move from Amazon shifts amazon in that direction and it understandably makes people uneasy.

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To act like their tracking stops once you leave the store is ignorant. They are doing the same exact thing as Amazon does.

I take your point but the behaviour described in that article is far from equivalent to a company having their ear on an individual’s wifi network (or to continue the prior analogy, following an individual to every location around town).

Most of the individual tracking in this article took place in store (or using a store’s additional services like the TV service). Most of the out-of-store stuff was all based on aggregate, rather than individual, information and didn’t appear to directly result in individual-level targeting (deciding where to build a store is not individual-level targeting). I’m not saying this isn’t tracking. It absolutely IS tracking, but “tracking” is not just one thing. Being part of an aggregate is different from being a uniquely identifiable (if still anonymous) individual entity being tracked and acted upon. Both are tracking, both are happening, but they are NOT the same.

Yes, there’s tracking going on everywhere, even grocers, and being tracked really isn’t optional any more. There’s no such thing as not being tracked, it’s really a question of “how much?”. For a lot of eero owners, the “how much” could be changing rather drastically and with (likely) little recourse.

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Interesting piece on routers and privacy and EFF and EPIC concerns.

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Yep, love MGG! I just started looking at Ubiquiti’s prosumer line that just came out.

Plume is interesting, but I think they manage everything like traffic, etc through their servers. I definitely could have misunderstood how they work their magic though.

Rene hits it square on the head. Actually didn’t know Amazon invested in ecobee #crap. Now have to replace Ring and ecobee… :roll_eyes:

Does anyone know how all this ties in with HomeKit? Wouldn’t we gain some anonymity that way?

I don’t think they manage traffic through their servers per se. But with (optional) subscription they optimize topology which can avoid nasty congestion from neighbor networks, and customize speed-ups by device and by location.

Dave at MGG is a big fan of that, if you listen to his part of the 5-minute discussion in that podcast I linked to above. When he first tested it out he couldn’t believe how fast it was, and contacted Plume to see what kind of sorcery was involved.

Jim Salter at Arstechnica did hours of comparison testing and found that the optimization worked as advertised, but that "if you let a subscription lapse in the article is correct - you get a very simple topology like what you get when you first fire up the pods before the cloud optimizer reorganizes their topology, you get a simplified interface that still allows you basic configs (change your WiFi password, etc) but you don’t get home pass, don’t get support, don’t get client specific device rules. "

And that default ‘dumb’ mesh connection still wasn’t bad:

Salter’s review is long and comprehensive, and it’s compelling.

If and when 802.11ax compatibility is promised/offered for Plume (it isn’t yet for any mesh network), I’m likely to buy it myself. Dave himself said that for him the two best home mesh networks now are eero and Plume.

If they were bought by Facebook, I would sprinkle my Eeros with sea salt, wrap them in a white cotton cloth, drive out into the woods on a Saturday, as far away from my home as possible, dig a deep hole in the ground, put the cloth-wrapped Eeros in the hole, burn them, and then bury the ashes. Just to be on the safe side.

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In the latest episode of Gruber’s Talk Show podcast, guest Rich Mogull, who’s a security expert with a specialty in Mac issues (he’s also an occasional writer for tidbits.com and Macworld.com on security topics) pointed out that because of legal issues in the US nothing will change without advance notice of changes in the terms of conditions. He also suggested that tracking or gathering info from mesh hardware might be illegal in GDPR countries (so at least people are probably safe there).

As an aside, he mentioned that at home he himself uses Ubiquiti mesh hardware.

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Which no onereads.

In the eero app, there’s no privacy policy

The privacy policy is over here. Mere use of the eero to transmit personally identifiable data is deemed consent with the policy. Non-personal or anonymized data can be used in whatever way eero chooses. So, they can change their policy anytime they want, it is not presented to the user for approval, and once you’ve transmitted PII then you’ve agreed to it.

In fairness, eero’s practices are standard. A useful visualizer tool for quickly understanding policies for devices and software you may have or be interested in is Polisis.

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Not “might”. It is. Thank you, EU.

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That was 2008-2011 before GDPR. GDPR doesn’t contain that much new stuff. But there’s one significant difference: huge fines.

As for privacy in the EU, I think we are pretty solid. Cold calling is unknown, sending spam is unknown, etc. Sure, not everything is perfect and we still have a lot of work before us, but if you look at the lack of privacy in the US (compared to EU)… shudder

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Has the acquisition gone through yet? I cannot find anything online suggesting so.

The Eero logo on their website proclaims it to be, “An Amazon Company” so I’d say that it’s gone through :slight_smile:

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The acquisition completed in March 2019.

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Oh, wow! Most acquisitions like the Slack acquisition take years to complete.