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

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 observe a two-faceted PET paradox. First, suppressing some information flows allows Amazon to promise narrow privacy guarantees to owners of Echo and Ring devices when "flipping" them into gateways. Once flipped, these gateways constitute a crowdsourced connectivity infrastructure that covers 90% of the US population and expands their AWS offerings. We show how novel information flows, enabled by Sidewalk connectivity, raise greater surveillance and competition concerns. Second, Amazon governs the implementation of these PETs, requiring manufacturers to adjust their device hardware, operating system and software; cloud use; factory lines; and organisational processes. Together, these changes turn manufacturers' endpoints into accessories of Amazon's computational infrastructure; further entrenching Amazon's infrastructural power. We argue that power analyses undergirding PET design should go beyond analysing information flows. We propose future steps for policy and tech research.