The PET Paradox: How Amazon Instrumentalises PETs in Sidewalk to Entrench Its Infrastructural Power
Thijmen van Gend, Donald Jay Bertulfo, Seda G\"urses

TL;DR
This paper examines how Amazon's Sidewalk service, while using Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs), paradoxically reinforces Amazon's infrastructural dominance by controlling information flows and device integration, raising surveillance and competition concerns.
Contribution
It provides an empirical analysis of Amazon's Sidewalk, revealing how PETs are used to entrench Amazon's infrastructural power through device governance and information flow manipulation.
Findings
Sidewalk extends Amazon's cloud infrastructure into IoT devices.
PETs are used to promise privacy while enabling surveillance.
Device manufacturers are integrated into Amazon's infrastructure.
Abstract
Recent applications of Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) reveal a paradox. PETs aim to alleviate power asymmetries, but can actually entrench the infrastructural power of companies implementing them vis-\`a-vis other public and private organisations. We investigate whether and how this contradiction manifests with an empirical study of Amazon's cloud connectivity service called Sidewalk. In 2021, Amazon remotely updated Echo and Ring devices in consumers' homes, to transform them into Sidewalk "gateways". Compatible Internet of Things (IoT) devices, called "endpoints", can connect to an associated "Application Server" in Amazon Web Services (AWS) through these gateways. We find that Sidewalk is not just a connectivity service, but an extension of Amazon's cloud infrastructure as a software production environment for IoT manufacturers. PETs play a prominent role in this pursuit: we…
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