La Blockchain à l’épreuve de la vie privée

Abstract

Presented as trust technologies, blockchains, by allowing secure peer-to-peer exchanges without the intermediary of a trusted third party, immediate and almost free of charge, have a strong disruptive potential. However, they are controversial, especially in terms of privacy. They raise issues of compliance with regulations and are accentuated by the emergence of a growing concern of users regarding the protection of their privacy. Through the analysis of a use case, the design and experimentation of a mobility service, we will show what challenges (governance, personal data management, transparency) this antagonism between Blockchains and privacy raises and what socio-technical compromises the actors have made to overcome them. If for the Blockchain specialists involved in the creation of this new service, these compromises have limited the disruptive potential of the technology by restricting its decentralized and anonymous character, they have allowed for the emergence of unexpected uses and benefits, such as confirming the choice of the Blockchain technology as a « privacy solution ». In addition, the search for solutions to ensure compliance has also involved socio-technical compromises that guarantee the acceptability of the service in the eyes of users, and have made it possible to take into account the broader issues of privacy (respect for intimacy, guarantee of autonomy and control of data) by going beyond the issues of compliance.