Universal Measurement Identifiers for Privacy-Preserving Matching
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing systems struggle to determine aggregate interactions with content while maintaining user privacy, as they often require access to personal information to correlate identifiers across different entities.
Innovation Solution
A cryptography and computer architecture methodology that encrypts and processes identifiers across multiple systems to generate universal measurement identifiers, ensuring privacy by concealing identities and enabling secure aggregation.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Measurement precision
If encrypted identifiers are processed to determine aggregate interactions, then measurement accuracy is improved, but privacy protection deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
A trusted third-party system acts as an intermediary that receives encrypted identifiers from multiple entities, performs matching operations on the encrypted data, and generates universal identifiers without any single entity accessing plain text identifiers. This mediator enables accurate measurement while preserving privacy through cryptographic techniques.
Solution Approach 2:
The system transforms identifiers through cryptographic encoding, converting plain text identifiers into encrypted form, then into universal identifiers through matching operations. This parameter transformation allows the same data to serve different purposes: maintaining privacy in encrypted form while enabling measurement through the transformed universal identifier.
2Loss of information
If identifiers are concealed from computing systems, then privacy protection is improved, but matching capability deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The trusted third-party system serves as a mediator that performs matching operations on concealed encrypted identifiers using cryptographic techniques. The system can detect and measure relationships between identifiers without any computing system actually seeing the plain text identifiers, thus maintaining both privacy and matching capability.
Solution Approach 2:
The system replaces traditional mechanical identifier matching (which requires accessing plain text) with cryptographic substitution. Instead of comparing plain text identifiers directly, the system uses encrypted matching techniques where the trusted third party can determine relationships between encrypted identifiers without decrypting them.
3Reliability
If multiple encryption layers are applied to identifiers, then security is improved, but system complexity deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The encryption system is segmented into distinct functional components: a trusted third-party system that manages the encryption keys and performs matching, and client systems that simply submit and receive results. This segmentation isolates the complexity to a single trusted component while keeping the overall system simple to operate.
Solution Approach 2:
The trusted third-party system acts as an intermediary that absorbs the complexity of multiple encryption layers. Client systems interact with a simple interface, while the intermediary handles the complex cryptographic operations, key management, and matching logic, thus hiding the system complexity from end users.
Data Source
AI summary
A method comprising receiving, at a first computing system, encrypted identifiers, performing, by the first computing system, a concealing operation on the encrypted identifiers to produce concealed encrypted identifiers, wherein the concealing operation conceals the encrypted identifiers from the first computing system and a second computing system but enables matching between the concealed encrypted identifiers, decrypting, by the second computing system, the concealed encrypted identifiers to produce concealed identifiers, analyzing, by the second computing system using one or more match rules, the concealed identifiers to generate one or more associations between the concealed identifiers, and generating, by the second computing system, one or more universal identifiers based on the one or more associations.