Get Started with Data 360 Clean Rooms
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe the core purpose of clean rooms.
- Explain the roles and responsibilities of the provider and the consumer.
- Identify the key security guardrails enforced by Data 360 clean rooms.
Knowing your customer is no longer a luxury; it’s the engine for success. However, as the global data landscape evolves, the traditional methods for building deep customer insights are facing new challenges.
In the past, organizations frequently relied on third-party data to fill the gaps in their first-party records. But today, with the rise of stricter privacy regulations and a stronger focus on customer trust, third-party data is no longer the reliable resource it once was. Now more than ever, businesses need a way to obtain high-quality insights from trusted sources while strictly adhering to privacy laws and regulations. The way to do this is to be able to collaborate with partners to enrich your data, but without compromising customer trust. This is where a clean room comes in.
What Is a Clean Room?
Suppose a history library and a geography library want to collaborate to find out how many of their members are interested in both subjects. Instead of sharing their books or private member lists, both libraries provide a digital catalog of their books and members to a secure, neutral environment. Inside this environment, the system runs preapproved analyses that scans both catalogs simultaneously to find the overlap. It doesn’t read the private details of the books or the personal addresses of the members; it simply identifies where the two maps align. The secure environment in this scenario is called a clean room.
A clean room is a secure, neutral, rules-based environment where two or more companies can safely compare customer groups to get useful, big-picture results, like figuring out audience overlap. You can use clean rooms to collaborate with other companies for cross-brand data analysis projects. Clean rooms ensure that such projects meet strict privacy and compliance standards. You get the insights you need but raw customer data never leaves your company’s control.
Explore Roles in Clean Rooms
In every clean room collaboration, there are two parties: provider and consumer. A provider is usually a company that has user data, while a consumer is a company that wants insights from that data. The exact functions that each party plays in a collaboration can vary based on the use case of the collaboration.
Role | Responsibility in a Clean Room | Benefits of Using Clean Rooms |
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Consumer |
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Data Security
The power of Data 360 clean rooms lies in the architecture. Security and transparency are built into the foundation so you know that your collaborations are always secure and compliant.
Mandatory Data Preparation and Segmentation
To collaborate, all sensitive customer details, especially personally-identifiable information (PII), should be encrypted before it enters the clean room. This ensures that unique identifiers are never exposed and cannot be traced back to the original customers. Also, you can only share user segments (groups of customers with similar traits) in a collaboration. For use cases that require individual customer records to be shared, privacy settings ensure that the customer records are hashed and only shared with the party that owns them.
Governing Queries with Collaboration Templates
The collaboration template is the single source of truth for every collaboration. These templates are like the operating manual and contract combined. Created by Salesforce or by the provider as JSON files, these templates strictly control the collaboration by defining:
- Match keys: Data points that are used to link individual records in different data sets. Usually, these are encrypted fields containing unique values like email addresses or phone numbers.
- Allowed queries: The preapproved SQL queries that can be run on the data.
- Access rules: Rules that dictate who is responsible for contributing data, who is allowed to run the queries, and who gets to see the final results.
- Required data: Data points that are mandatory for a particular use case.
Privacy Guardrails and Audit Logs
To prevent anyone from reverse-engineering the results to find individual customers, Data 360 enforces strict privacy rules.
- Results are summarized (like showing a total number of overlapping customers). If a result contains individual customer records, it’s only shared with the party who owns the data.
- Results must involve a minimum number of people (for example, a count of at least 100 matched individuals) to ensure the groups are large enough to protect privacy.
- For complete accountability, all activity—every query run and every data access—is recorded in the Clean Room Audit Log DMO, providing full transparency for everyone involved.
Use Cases
Here are some scenarios to explore how different industries are using clean rooms to deliver delightful experiences for their customers.
Insurance: Protecting More Than Just Data
The scenario: A home insurance provider is offering policy holders a discount on smart home security systems to help them secure their homes and potentially lower their premiums.
Challenge | Clean Room Solution | Result |
|---|---|---|
The insurance company needs to identify the best security company to partner with for this offer, while security firms need to find user segments that are most likely to be interested in smart home security systems. | The insurance company initiates clean room collaborations with multiple security companies to find the overlap percentages in its datasets. Though the insurance company uses AWS clean rooms, it can use custom templates to collaborate with security companies using Data 360 clean rooms. If the overlap percentage is high, the insurance company can partner up with the security company for this offer. | The insurance company can use reliable insights to select a security company as a partner. The security company unlocks a strong selling point and has better insights into audience segments that might be more interested in its products. |
Sports and Entertainment: Supercharging the Fan Experience
The scenario: A professional basketball team and a local ride-share app want to team up to offer a "Safe Ride Home" discount to season ticket holders.
Challenge | Clean Room Solution | Result |
|---|---|---|
The ride-share app needs to understand which fans typically attend games without the basketball team sharing their actual fan database. | They use clean rooms to compare the fan base with users of the ride-share app. The list of fans who use the ride-share app is shared directly with the app. | The team drives growth by enhancing the game-day experience, and the ride-share app gains users who are actively looking for rides during peak hours. |
Pharma and Healthcare: Clinical Trial Recruitment
The scenario: A pharma company wants to accelerate the recruitment process for rare disease clinical trials by identifying patients with highly specific symptoms.
Challenge | Clean Room Solution | Result |
|---|---|---|
The majority of valuable patient data—including EHR, pharmacy claims, and genomic data—resides outside of their own infrastructure. Moving this sensitive information is restricted by strict HIPAA regulations. Currently, the process relies on manual site references, which are slow, expensive, and often result in missed opportunities for eligible participants. | The pharma company defines an ideal patient profile (biomarker results, inclusion/exclusion criteria, age, and so forth) within Salesforce Data 360 and invites a partner health care institution into a clean room. This secure, neutral zone allows both parties to analyze their respective datasets simultaneously without the hospital ever moving or sharing raw electronic health records. The pharma company provides the trial parameters, while the hospital contributes patient IDs and diagnosis codes for the analysis to run against. | The analysis identifies a precise count of eligible participants. This allows the pharma company to trigger recruitment workflows directly in Salesforce and request that the clinic send anonymous surveys to those specific leads. The result is a recruitment process that is faster, significantly cheaper, and 100% HIPAA-compliant, all while ensuring total patient privacy. |
Get Started
Data 360 clean rooms are available to all Data 360 customers. Providers using external clean rooms, like AWS, can also use Data 360 clean rooms to easily partner with a Data 360 consumer. This makes it simpler to collaborate with partners regardless of the technology they use.
If you’re a provider, sign up on AppExchange to offer clean room packages. If you’re a consumer, explore partnership opportunities with providers using Data 360 or AWS clean rooms.