During the recent re:Invent conference, AWS announced the preview of Clean Rooms for analytics data. The new service provides safe environments where multiple customers can securely share and analyze data with control of how the data is used, reducing the risk of sharing personal data.
According to the cloud provider, by using Clean Rooms users can collaborate with hundreds of thousands of companies on AWS for consumer insights, marketing measurement, forecasting, or risk assessment.
Source: https://aws.amazon.com/clean-rooms/
Clean Rooms is based on the concept of Collaboration, a logical boundary in which members can perform SQL queries on configured tables. The service helps customers protect data by restricting the queries that can be run on the data tables using analysis rules: the Aggregation Analysis Rules allow only queries that generate aggregate statistics, like campaign measurement or attribution, while the List Analysis Rules allow queries that analyze the intersection of a dataset. The cloud provider explains:
Minimum aggregation constraints will allow you to set conditions for output row returns. These constraints are in the form of COUNT DISTINCT (Column) >= Threshold. If an output row in the query result does not meet that constraint, it is automatically redacted.
Clean Rooms will include Cryptographic Computing for Clean Rooms (C3R), an option to pre-encrypt data using a client-side encryption tool that uses a secret key shared with other participants in the collaboration. The service is designed to publish the queries to CloudWatch Logs for monitoring purposes.
Among the use cases, AWS suggests collaborating with advertising and marketing partners, improving reporting, and accelerating research and development. Comscore, Experian, Fox Corporation, and LiveRamp are among the customers supposed to use the service.
Some developers doubt the "privacy-enhanced data collaboration" statement, while others question the name or wonder how the service is going to affect companies that offer data connectivity platforms like LiveRamp or Snowflake.
AWS is not the first cloud provider targeting the advertising space, with Google offering Ads Data Hub and Amazon itself offering Marketing Cloud. As most data clean rooms only work for a single platform, in a Reddit thread user keatonhj comments:
I work in publishing and cleanroom tech is a confusing mess. The only reasonable solution is a monopoly in cleanroom tech so that all ID vendors work with it. So far... let's say you have a client with tealium IDs and your publisher network already uses RAMP IDs, then you need a clean room just for that, but how many clients is that really?
According to the cloud provider, AWS Clean Rooms will be available in early 2023 with the preview "coming in a few weeks".