Design and Dissemination of Blockchain Technologies: The Challenge of Privacy

Abstract

AbstractPresented as trust technologies, blockchains, by allowing immediate secure peer-to-peer exchanges without a trusted third party, have strong disruptive potential, but raise privacy issues. We illustrate some challenges that this antagonism raises and the sociotechnical compromises made to overcome them, by analysing the design of a mobility service by a consortium of some fifteen operators, and its experimentation with the employees of these operators. The service seeks to respond to the new needs linked to the electrification of company fleets, by tracking the recharging of (personal) electric vehicles at work or (professional) vehicles at home with a view to reimbursing employees’ professional expenses by relying on a blockchain. Privacy management is a skill, based on emerging expertise, distributed across a range of professions and users, which requires compromises between different conceptions of technology and data to be guaranteed. For blockchain designers, these compromises have limited the disruptive potential of blockchain technology by recentralising data management and losing the open nature of blockchain. However, in the eyes of other designers and users, they have allowed unexpected uses and benefits to emerge, such as reinforcing the choice of blockchain technology as a “privacy solution”.