Encrypted Email Suppression via Third-Party Mediator
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Solution Overview
Problem
In the email marketing domain, there is a challenge in determining common email addresses between a marketer's suppression list and an affiliate's list without disclosing non-common information, as both parties view their data as private and are subject to privacy policies that prohibit sharing customer data with third parties.
Innovation Solution
The solution involves using encryption techniques, such as one-way hashing algorithms like SHA-1, to generate encrypted strings for both lists, allowing for the comparison of these strings to identify matching addresses without revealing non-common information, thereby enabling suppression of emails to only the common addresses.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If the marketer sends the suppression list to the affiliate for removal, then email suppression can be achieved, but the marketer's customer data is disclosed to the affiliate
Solution Approach 1:
A third-party service acts as an intermediary between the marketer and affiliate. The marketer sends encrypted suppression data to the third party, which then provides the affiliate with a modified affiliate list that has suppression entries removed, without either party exposing their raw data to the other.
Solution Approach 2:
The third-party service creates a copy of the affiliate's email list and processes this copy by removing suppressed addresses, rather than requiring the affiliate to process the original marketer suppression list or the marketer to process the original affiliate list.
2Reliability
If the affiliate sends its list to the marketer for suppression removal, then email suppression can be achieved, but the affiliate's customer data is disclosed to the marketer
Solution Approach 1:
The third-party service serves as a mediator that receives the affiliate's list, applies suppression logic using encrypted marketer data, and returns a cleaned list to the affiliate, preventing direct data exposure between marketer and affiliate.
Solution Approach 2:
The third party creates a copy of the affiliate list for processing, removes suppressed addresses from this copy, and returns only the cleaned copy to the affiliate, keeping the original affiliate list private.
3Measurement precision
If both parties exchange raw lists for comparison, then common addresses can be identified, but both parties' private information is disclosed
Solution Approach 1:
The third-party service acts as a secure intermediary that performs the comparison operation between marketer suppression data and affiliate list data, returning only the results of the comparison without exposing the underlying private data sets to either party.
Solution Approach 2:
The third party works with copies of the data sets rather than the original private data, performing the intersection operation on these copies and returning only the matching results to the appropriate party.
Data Source
AI summary
Techniques utilizing common encryption approaches for data from multiple parties enable those parties to discover information that is held in common by the parties without disclosing to any party information that is not held in common by the parties. Encrypted information for each party can be compared to determine which encrypted values match, and those encrypted values can be returned to any of the parties such that a party can determine which corresponding data the parties have in common, without having access to any other data of any other parties.