Comparing Without Sharing: Fantix Delivers Interoperability to Data Clean Rooms
Data Clean Rooms (DCR) are a good solution for mining privacy-safe, actionable data now that third-party cookies have met their demise. It is – however – becoming increasingly clear to companies that the security, privacy, and compliance that’s central to DCRs created some barriers to collaboration. That’s where Fantix comes in. DCRs can now compare insights quickly, cost-effectively, and securely without sharing any first-party data.
According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, almost forty percent of DCR users report data interoperability and customization challenges. How can companies maximize their DCRs’ capabilities and dynamically team up with strategic partners while staying privacy-safe?
DCRs are all the rage
Since 2017, DCRs have become the holy grail of digital advertising. With the ability to guide the end-to-end advertising process, it’s no wonder. Access to key insights, consumer behavior, and campaign planning and measurement tools can make or break a business. As companies gain experience, however, they’re discovering that DCRs could use some upgrades to better enable data collaborations with multiple partners.
But, they present some challenges when it comes to accessibility
Let’s start with data sharing. DCRs are first and foremost enterprise platforms used to share and operate on data within the same organization and/or with a very limited number of data partners at most. Which means that data can only be compared internally or against one or two other companies. And there’s that pesky privacy issue. To maintain privacy, companies often don’t share their DCRs with external parties. So, if you’re Custom Ink and want to find out what else people are buying besides red t-shirts for Valentine’s Day, you’re out of luck.
Fantix removed the barriers
Enabling DCR collaboration means giving organizations three things: the ability to work with whoever they choose, whenever they choose; compatible data; a privacy-safe environment. So, that’s what we did.
We took a different approach
Data in DCRs is usually encrypted by a data partner. Data encryption is the process of converting plain information into a code that cannot be understood without a specific key or password. With the right kind of encryption, the underlying information is relatively safe, but encryption keys can be stolen (as 33 million LastPass users recently discovered). This poses challenges to privacy in creating data collaboratives across multiple partners, as the use of DCRs still requires data sets to be shared and transferred between servers of the different partners in the collaborative.
So we challenged ourselves to find a better way, and came up with data abstraction to allow DCRs to communicate and exchange insights easily and safely.
Fantix’s Federated Knowledge Engine (FKE) is based on a proprietary method of trading knowledge without trading data. It’s called data abstraction. Technically, an abstraction is a probabilistic representation of the information in a data set – figuratively, it’s a sketch of what is aggregated in the data set (without user-level information). Fantix members can generate an abstraction without exporting, uploading or transferring their data: the process is simple, using a cloud or desktop application. Once the abstraction is generated, it is uploaded to Fantix and compared with the abstractions of other members of the federation. Fantix then runs an overlap analysis and returns insights to the members.
Abstractions are one-way and can’t be reverse-engineered. Not even Fantix has access to the underlying data of each abstraction.
A fast, easy, affordable option to boost DCR interoperability
DCRs have an interoperability problem. Connecting multiple clean rooms requires considerable effort and expensive ongoing maintenance.
There’s a better way. Fantix abstractions give DCRs the power to scale quickly while remaining privacy-safe. Multiple parties can contribute and compare abstractions: two partners, ten partners, or even 200 partners – which would be unrealistic without Fantix as it would require managing 200 data pipelines. Collaborations can easily be defined and set up to allow users to access abstractions as quickly as needed. Best of all, there’s flexibility. You choose your partners and choose the criteria. You can even make dynamic changes. After all, you or your client may need to know which products to put on sale tomorrow. No extra personnel is required. Just add the query and the Fantix app does the work.
DCRs have left digital marketing teams scratching their heads about how to expand their partnerships. There is a world of insights out there waiting to be tapped. It’s time to look at comparing data without sharing it. Contact us for a live demo or more information.