Data Clean Rooms: Enabling Analytics, Protecting Privacy

AWS announced AWS Clean Rooms, a new analytics service that helps companies across industries easily and securely analyze and collaborate on their combined datasets without sharing or revealing underlying data, according to an announcement at the AWS re:Invent.

While the packaged service is new at Amazon Web Services, it’s not a new concept for data pros, and Amazon is not the first to offer such a service. Yet the fact that Amazon is offering such a service indicates the idea is becoming mainstream.

Just what are data clean rooms? How are they used and why are they growing in popularity today?

What are Data Clean Rooms?

First, data clean rooms aren’t actual physical rooms. They are virtual constructs made up of tools that are designed to help organizations share sensitive data in a safe way that protects personally identifiable information and also protects the trade secrets and proprietary information of organizations.

Forrester analyst Tina Moffett explains that fundamentally, data clean rooms are a data collaboration tool that allows data to be used collaboratively across organizations and even outside organizations, but in a way that preserves privacy and follows data governance rules.

This is not a new concept. Several industries have previously used such tools to share highly sensitive documents; for instance, documents used in merger and acquisition activities.

“Now marketers have started to think about how they could use clean rooms as a way to share data with their publisher partners because of the depreciation of the third-party cookie.”

Third-party cookies are the cookies that allow organizations to track your activity and behavior across multiple websites. They are why you keep seeing that same advertisement follow you from site to site. Many web browsers now block third-party cookies and Google has said that its Chrome browser will start blocking third-party cookies in 2024. (Google originally set 2022 as the date for this but has allowed it to slip a few times already.)

Read the rest of this article on InformationWeek.

Other articles in the series:

• Data Privacy and Protection in the Age of Cloud: With more data on more cloud platforms being subject to increasingly stringent regulations, traditional approaches to protecting data fall short.
• Privacy Debate for 2023: Can Data Collection Persist As Is?: More layers of state and federal regulation on data privacy loom on the horizon, with political agendas and business needs also adding tension to the mix.
• Trusted Execution Environments Make Computing More Private: Trusted execution environments are changing the face of cloud computing -- and they will have an even bigger impact in the months and years ahead.
• Data Strategy: Synthetic Data and Other Tech for AI's Next Phase: Forrester's Data Strategy & Insights event will offer insights to help you take your machine learning and artificial intelligence initiatives to the next phase.
• Stealth Data Collection Threatens Employee Privacy: Secretly and quietly, often without enterprise knowledge or permission, cybersecurity and monitoring tools are scooping up an array of sensitive employee data.
• How Should Data Brokers and Credit Bureaus Be Protecting Your Data?: The largest stewards of personally identifiable information have poor cybersecurity records. What have they learned from previous breaches?
• Data Clean Rooms: Enabling Analytics, Protecting Privacy: Data clean rooms offer a way for organizations to collaborate with and share data in a protected environment that preserves privacy and governance. Here's why they are on the rise now.
• The Top 5 Data Privacy Penalties Post-GDPR: From California to China and the country that fined itself, here are the five most interesting data privacy penalties of 2021-22.
• How to Build Privacy By Design Into Customer Experience: The predatory nature of data collection is spiking demand for data privacy protection as part of the customer experience. Are you ready to deliver that?
• Exploring End-to-End Encrypted Messaging and the Enterprise: Data clean rooms offer a way for organizations to collaborate with and share data in a protected environment that preserves privacy and governance. Here's why they are on the rise now.
• The Companies Leading Privacy-Enabling Tech: Selecting a data privacy management vendor requires organizations to carefully consider their specific needs, and the level of help they need to meet compliance requirements.
• What Do the Multimillion-Dollar Google Settlement, Meta Fine Mean for Data Privacy?: Google agreed to pay a significant amount in a settlement for violating consumer privacy laws. Could this settlement and Meta’s latest fine be the beginning of a new future for data privacy?