Versium Releases Free File Hasher Tool to Ensure Privacy of First-Party Data for Advertisers

Open source tool provides privacy-forward approach to collaborating with partners

As part of its growing open source initiative to equip the development and data community with valuable data toolsets, Versium, a leading data technology company, announced it has released File Hasher – a free tool that hashes and saves first-party data to ensure privacy when working with third-party vendors. Versium’s File Hasher is a privacy-forward approach to working with customer data that optimizes for identity resolution – both outside and inside of data clean rooms.

Data clean rooms have materialized as a solution amid tighter data privacy regulations, where aggregate data from walled gardens or other vendors is combined with first-party data from advertisers to glean insights about ad performance. However, data clean rooms can be cost prohibitive, and there is currently no easy or secure way for advertisers to share data with third parties who aren’t leveraging the technology yet. If an advertiser wants to upload target audiences to a data augmentation platform, they have to choose between sending raw data or not sending it at all.

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Versium’s File Hasher is a free tool that performs basic data hygiene and then hashes a file. First-party data elements that require an additional layer of security – such as email addresses, names, phone numbers and more – are then hashed and can be shared without needing to go through a data clean room. File Hasher runs in a web browser like Chrome, Safari, Edge and Brave, 100% offline and without a network connection. As an added benefit, hashed files can also be used in data clean rooms for walled gardens like Google and Meta.

“The emergence of privacy regulations has led to increasing concerns about the security of transferring and sharing first-party data,” said Kevin Marcus, CTO, Versium. “Versium’s File Hasher easily standardizes and hashes a file on your computer and saves the output to be used by any number of third parties, so PII never leaves the client. With this hashed data, advertisers can leverage audience matching with any number of vendors to understand how their campaigns are performing. When the vendor also uses File Hasher, the matching is consistent due to the standardization in cleansing, which better supports consistent matching from provider to provider.”

Versium’s suite of solutions powered by its identity resolution and insights engine is also compatible with the hashed output from File Hasher. Advertisers can leverage Versium REACH to match hashed fields other providers are unable to handle and match – such as address, phone number and more. File Hasher combined with Versium REACH is optimized for matching hashed data to create easy identity graph traversals.

Versium empowers businesses with the data tools and insights they need to win customers. Its proprietary identity graph and data technology platform help marketers better identify, understand and reach their ideal customer, every time.

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