How to Select the Best Data Clean Room for Your Business

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard of a data clean room. They’ve been causing a stir—even Amazon recently announced that they’ve released their own Clean Rooms. But even as data clean rooms become increasingly ubiquitous, businesses continue to define them differently.

TechTarget defines a data clean room as “a technology service that helps content platforms keep first person user data private,” while Digiday explains that it’s where companies “like Google, Facebook and Amazon share aggregated rather than customer-level data with advertisers, while still exerting strict controls.” Search Engine Journal claims it’s the “key for measuring advertising effectiveness in a soon-to-be cookieless world.”

Essentially, a data clean room is a secure environment that allows multiple parties to combine different data sources for analysis under prescribed guidelines and privacy protections, which enables simplified and secure access to different data sources.

But with so many different definitions of the same idea, it’s become nearly impossible to compare one data clean room against another. At the end of the day, data scientists, marketers, investors, and decision makers care about great data and informative analytics. So how can you evaluate which one is best?

Take Accountability in Your Partnerships

A great data clean room should make your life easier, so it’s worth taking the time to choose the right one. Equipped with great data and informative analytics, you can focus your effort on what really matters to your business.

In an ideal world your data clean room is equipped with powerful tools, like an intuitive interface, rapid automation, high quality data, and actionable insights. At Spectus, we believe the most important factor to look for when evaluating a data clean room is privacy.

Why privacy above all else? It’s never been more critical to work with location data partners that share a focus on data integrity and consumer privacy. Lots of companies claim to be “privacy-safe”, but don’t actually commit the necessary resources toward research and development. With restrictions tightening and new legislation on the horizon, state-of-the-art privacy enhancing technologies have become the baseline, not the goal. If your million-dollar decisions are based on a platform that has weak privacy protections, chances are you’re not only violating user privacy and setting yourself up for a PR nightmare, but soon enough you’ll be without a data supply.

Finding The Perfect Data Partner

Selecting the right data clean room doesn’t need to be complicated. We’ve outlined a few key questions to ask:

• Does this partner have a proven track record of leading their industry in data privacy?
• Does the clean room utilize privacy enhancing technologies to support their data privacy claims?
• Will the clean room help you manage your increasingly complex obligations of handling sensitive data, such as processing user privacy requests?
• Are they focused only on data monetization, or are they also trusted by non-profit and research institutions to power privacy-safe insights for the public good?

If you can answer these questions, you are well on your way to unlocking value in your data. If you don’t like what you hear after asking the above, ask yourself do I really want to share my most valuable assets with this partner?

Make impactful, data-driven decisions faster—without privacy concerns. Learn why Spectus is the partner you’ve been looking for.