AWS gets data clean rooms for analytics data • TechCrunch

AWS today launched a new service that will help users inside an advertising or marketing organization share data with other employees inside their company or with outside partners, all without running the risk of inadvertently sharing personal data.

This new service is part of Amazon’s new AWS for Advertising & Marketing initiative, which aims to leverage existing AWS services — and those from its partners — to provide purpose-built services for them. Clean Rooms is the first major new product of this initiative.

“Data clean rooms are protected environments where multiple parties can analyze combined data without ever exposing the raw data,” AWS CEO Adam Selipsky explained in today’s keynote. “The clean rooms are hard to build. Their complex requirements take months to develop and once you’ve built a clean room you have to continuously update the data all the while meeting requests for new collaborators and data types.”

A company that has a customer’s loyalty data, for example, could collaborate with another that has data on a user’s ad-clicking behavior to create new insights into a user’s behavior, all without every sharing that user’s raw and identifiable data, Selipsky argued.

“With these insights, we can produce even more relevant ads while maintaining privacy for everyone to get started,” he said. “Brands and media publishers use the clean room console or the API and they set up a clean room and start collaborating with other companies in just a few clicks. So instead of spending months of development time to customize the types of queries and restrictions, you just need to allow partners to run these clean rooms with you.”

The idea here is to provide a single service that companies can use to collaborate on data while still protecting the underlying data, using a set of configurable controls. All collaborators can contribute their own data, be it in plain text, hashed, or pre-encrypted. Then, they can use these clean rooms to collaborate on this data, all without revealing the raw data to each other.

In total, there can be up to five collaborators and their data is stored in an AWS Glue Data Catalog. When anyone runs a query over this data, Clean Rooms will read it, wherever it lives, and then the service will automatically apply the pre-set rules to protect each participant’s raw data. Each table can have its own rules, which restrict the type of query that is allowed. Encrypted data will remain encrypted when these queries are run.

“Customers in the advertising and marketing industry have been seeking new ways to interoperate with their partners while protecting consumer data and reducing heavy lifting from their engineering teams,” said Tim Barnes, director of solutions for advertising & marketing technology at AWS. “With the launch of AWS Clean Rooms and AWS for Advertising & Marketing, AWS customers now have a broad set of solutions that make it easier for them to securely collaborate together, operate cost-effectively at petabyte scale and millisecond latency, and innovate more quickly in areas like advertising measurement and customer experience.”