The PET Paradox: How Amazon Instrumentalises PETs in Sidewalk to Entrench Its Infrastructural Power

Privacy engineers originally conceptualised Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) to pursue data minimisation, purpose limitation, and trust minimisation (avoiding single points of failure); thereby curbing corporate and state power over people. Through a review of Google and Apple applications, and an in-depth case study of cloud connectivity service Amazon Sidewalk, we show how companies with concentrated power over computational infrastructures implement PETs with paradoxical effects. These companies can deploy PETs on large swaths of devices – a huge benefit – while introducing new capabilities and expanding their control over devices, OSes, and applications. In doing so, these companies increase their informational, market and infrastructural power. To reveal how these paradoxes come to be, we apply a broader framework including how the design of PETs impacts (1) information flows, (2) consumer privacy, (3) infrastructural companies’ control over consumer devices, and (4) business-to-business (B2B) and -government (B2G) relationships implicated by these; focussing on (3) and (4). We analyse the consequences for information, market and infrastructural power asymmetries, that affect consumers, businesses, and governments, and shape the future implementation of PETs. For the Google and Apple cases, we rely on desk research. For our case study into Amazon Sidewalk, we conduct elite interviews with 8 of the 16 adopting manufacturers. We triangulate results with Amazon’s (technical) documentation and marketing as well as grey literature. We conclude by discussing how we should expand PET design and evaluation processes to avoid the paradoxical outcomes that these infrastructural players bring to being.