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Comment by alexandrerond | Hacker News Reader

I rebooted my router yesterday while watching something. My Amazon Fire stick, upon losing connection with the default wlan, automatically connected to an available, unencrypted Vodafone hotspot from nearby and automatically showed a popup window offering me the different connection options in the middle of the movie. Shady and creepy as hell.

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I think amazon offers a mechanism on your Amazon linked devices of sharing wifi credentials. If you had ever fired up an amazon fire tablet or something and connected to that hotspot, the fire STICK may have accessed the wireless history and assumed it was yours to connect to.

No, I never connected to this hotspot that I know of. In Germany Vodafone automatically enables their hotspots on the routers of people.

This only proves the plausibility of the vector, not that it's being used. It seems that it was done in the interests of usability, maybe, but if I worked for Amazon I would have pushed back on this feature: joining a wifi access point without permission is a bad practice, and this would have been very confusing for most users, as well as a security nightmare.

To be honest, I don't think I've seen anyone claim that TV X connects to unsecured hotspots. The claims I see are that it is possible. It's a matter of time before this is the norm.

There was a post on /r/privacy that claimed just that. Got quite a bit of upvotes/responses too.

https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/bpr6xs/if_you_choo...

Not only bad practice, but potentially not legal. Whether or not you think it's morally ok to connect to unsecured wifi without consent, in some places the law may prohibit it.

i can confirm that it's illegal at least in singapore

Amazon Sidewalk enabled?

most likely just amazon doing what everyone else does and storing your wifi history and password in the cloud under your account. so as you switch/add devices it's easier to setup

https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Sidewalk/

Never used

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