I know there were concerns when Eero was purchased by Amazon in ~2019 for a large sum. The cost was justified for many as an investment in the Alexa line, but others questioned what telemetry would be added. Imagine Amazon having access at the router level to your entire browsing history and active times… that would be quite beneficial for a marketplace.
At the time, Eero said their policies would remain the same. As with closed-source software, it’s a trust-based system, and I’m wondering what level of trust Eero even has?
I use one of their older devices, an Eero 6 Pro. I use it in bridge mode, behind an OpenWRT router. You do need to register an account to use Eero, but you do not have to link it to your Amazon account nor enable Alexa. Eero maintains their own registration service, but with all of their infrastructure (webhost, cloud services, etc) running through Amazon, I don’t know how much that means. Of course you could use an alias for the name and e-mail address on this account as they require no KYC.
At the DNS level, I notice’d Eero was making a lot of outgoing connections. So I blocked every instance manually for testing purposes, wondering what would break. After blocking everything, I was surprised to find that my network wasn’t affected- at least perceivably to me.
The Eero itself now displayed a red led, typically indicating that the network is distraught. I opened the Eero app and it notified me that the network was offline and that the ethernet ports were empty.
I tested the wi-fi connection on all my devices, ensured the Eero was the only device broadcasting any network and every device connected successfully.
The Eero app also no longer shows any devices being connected to the wi-fi network, the activity tab and the speed test and other features are disabled as well.
Their privacy policy cheat sheet states:
Quick links to our Privacy Promises
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We will be clear about the Personal Information we collect and how we use it.
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We are not in the business of selling our customers’ Personal Information.
It ends with:
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Other Disclosures
Regardless of any choices you make regarding your Personal Information (as described below), we may disclose Personal Information if we believe in good faith that such disclosure is necessary (a) in connection with any legal investigation; (b) to comply with relevant laws or to respond to subpoenas or warrants served on eero or as otherwise permissible by law; (c) to protect or defend the rights, property, or safety of eero, users of the Products, or others; or (d) to investigate or assist in preventing any violation or potential violation of the law, this Privacy Notice, or our Terms of Service.
TLDR: What’s Eero’s trust level, is DNS blocking enough to disable its telemetry, or is this a silent assassin in my home secretly selling my soul out to big tech?