Table of Contents
Overview
As the identity landscape continues to evolve, email addresses are emerging as a primary key for identity integrations across the board. One example to illustrate this is the prevalence of an email address as the primary key of many universal ID solutions, such as The Trade Desk's UID 2.0, LiveIntent, ID5, and many others. As a result, buyers in the AdTech space have started to center their first-party Identity strategy around scaling their programs to collect or license email addresses. In response, Beeswax has added Hashed Email Addresses (HEMs) to the FreeWheel Identity Network. This solution offers a shortcut for clients to skip Personal Identifiable Information-based (PII) ID onboarding, and go straight to segment uploading and clean-room-based measurement. The FreeWheel Identity Network has over 400 million distinct hashed emails at both the person and household levels. This page focuses on uploading Hashed Email Addresses into segments directly on Beeswax.
What is a Hashed Email?
Hashed Email addresses are encrypted email addresses used for identifying and targeting users while maintaining consumer privacy. They are built from clear-text email addresses and are used to enable personalized advertising without exposing raw email addresses. Hashing could be understood as a technical method to encrypt personal data while allowing for targeted advertising. It is one-way and secure, making it extremely difficult to reverse-engineer. This approach allows FreeWheel to offer an email-based identity solution in an ethical and privacy-preserving manner.
A “salt” in the context of cryptography and data security is a random data string added to the end of an input before hashing. This technique enhances security by making common attacks less effective. For example, use SQL to apply the FreeWheel salt to the email address. Example below:
SELECT
SHA2(CONCAT(UPPER(email),'{FW SALT}'), 256) AS email_sha256
FROM customer_crm_data
Use Cases
There are a number of use cases in which email-based audiences or identity data can unlock the value of data faster and cheaper than current available options. Currently, Beeswax offers a Segment Extension use case to upload email-based segments directly instead of relying on a traditional onboarder's time and cost requirements.
Instructions for Use
Beeswax supports hashed emails in log-level data via Identity Enriched Logs.
This feature is available for all Beeswax customers who have FreeWheel Identity Network enabled. Although hashed email uploading is a no-cost feature, FreeWheel Identity Network audience extension fees still apply. Please reach out to your Beeswax Account representative for more information.
Request the activation of FreeWheel Identity Network from your Beeswax Account Representative.
Have the Beeswax representative send the FreeWheel Salt via email.
Hash the emails using the following parameters:
- Convert the email string to uppercase before hashing.
- Use SHA-256 as the encryption type.
- Append the 64-character salt string received to the end of the email input.
After hashing the emails, follow the standard instructions for segment upload.
Upon uploading the segments into Beeswax, target the segments on the line item. Since Hashed Emails are not included in the bid request, apply the FreeWheel Identity Network audience extension at either the campaign or line item level to deliver on the HEM segments. See more here.