I see a lot of HA users using the Ring Keypad to arm/disarm their alarm over Z-Wave. I’m suspicious of Amazon, probably overly so. I just tore out a Ring doorbell. Having said that, if this thing can work entirely free of cloud dependencies, it may still work for me.
Can the ring keypad phone home or exfiltrate telemetry data about my network? Does it connect to this Amazon sidewalk network they’ve created?
I don’t want to give Amazon any window into my home.
Wouldn’t it need an Internet connection, Wi-Fi or wired, to communicate with Amazon?
Mine just say they have Z-wave. They don’t say anything about having a MAC address like internet connected devices usually do.
No, if they truly can connect to the Amazon sidewalk network, then they would connect to somebody else’s Alexa, which would then send the data onto Amazon over the internet.
Is there an Alexa device that supports Z-wave?
Best thing to do is vote with your wallet - don’t buy Amazon e-commerce if you don’t support them. It’s worth noting that the vast majority of their value comes from AWS, but there’s little we can do about that.
It can’t phone home if it isn’t powered, that’s for sure.
You can always set up a PiHole or AdGuard Home instance and route traffic from the doorbell to keep an eye on it, and block any domains it tries to access that you don’t need. Or disable its WAN access entirely. Custom DNS settings in the router would be ideal, just set it to the IP of the instance, but as I’ve discovered some ISPs like to remove that setting as part of their enshittification.
Amazon Sidewalk means that PiHole or AdGuard won’t stop anything, because the point of amazon sidewalk is that if a device can’t find a usable internet connection (ie, you didnt set up wifi, or you dont have wifi), it can still function by connecting to nearby open networks, or perhaps even someone just walking by with a phone that it can piggyback off of.
So setting up a pihole prevents it from phoning home on your network, which will just prompt it to jump to another network potentially.
The question is just “how aggressively does this device want to phone home?” Some devices will actively seek out ways to phone home if blocked, some devices will try to phone home and give up if blocked. Some devices don’t try to phone home at all.
Not phoning home is ideal, a pihole will (probably) keep a device that stays on your network under control, and you should just not buy things that actively will work around your intentions to do whatever it wants without your permission.
But this person has already bought the thing, so “dont buy it” isn’t an option. But “don’t use it” might be. Depending on which category it’s in. (which I do not know, just trying to illustrate the bigger problem with Amazon Sidewalk)
The doorbell is gone. I replaced it with a different one that works locally. At this point it’s just the a keypad I need to acquire. I agree with you that I should vote with my dollar. It seems that there aren’t a lot of options. I see a round radial-like one out there from a few different sellers but there’s really a dearth of information. Perhaps I’ll have to dig a bit more. Other than the HA forum, is there anywhere in particular you would recommend looking?
