Data clean room

A data clean room (DCR) is a cloud service that lets two or more companies analyze their data together under rules each side agrees to. The US Federal Trade Commission describes them as "cloud data processing services that let companies exchange and analyze data, restrained by rules that limit data use."

How it works. Participants in the exchange cannot see each other's raw data, and each party agrees to a contract governing what it can and cannot do with the combined data. What sets a clean room apart from an ordinary data transfer, the FTC says, is its "constraints": rules that limit the analysis that can run on the data and what can be exported.

Uses in advertising. IAB Tech Lab lists three advertising uses: activating audiences for advertisers, consumer insights and data enrichment, and optimization and measurement. The FTC's example is a newspaper and a grocery store identifying grocery sales made to newspaper subscribers to judge whether an ad worked.

Who offers them. Early clean rooms began inside walled gardens, including Google's Ads Data Hub; Amazon Marketing Cloud is another. AWS Clean Rooms lets companies analyze combined datasets without sharing or copying one another's underlying data. LiveRamp acquired Habu, and Snowflake acquired Samooha.

Standards. IAB Tech Lab released version 1.0 of its Data Clean Room Guidance in July 2024, with a first interoperability standard for private audience activation. Its PAIR protocol, originally developed by the Google Ads team, lets advertisers and publishers match first-party data without third-party cookies; version 1.1 was finalized in July 2025.

Privacy limits. The FTC warns that clean-room protections "are not typically automatic" — each constraint must be configured — so using one "isn't a reliable guarantor of privacy." Unlawful disclosure or use of data, it adds, is unlawful whether or not a clean room is involved.