What is Data Clean Room?
A secure environment where multiple parties can share and analyze combined datasets without exposing raw data to each other.
Definition
A data clean room is a privacy-safe technology that lets two or more organizations combine their first-party datasets for analysis without either party seeing the other's raw data. The clean room enforces strict access controls: you can run aggregate queries and build audience segments, but you can't export individual-level records. Major providers include Google Ads Data Hub, AWS Clean Rooms, Snowflake Data Clean Rooms, and LiveRamp. The concept borrows from pharmaceutical research, where "clean rooms" prevent contamination.
Why It Matters
With third-party cookies dying and privacy regulations tightening, data clean rooms are becoming the primary way brands and publishers collaborate on audience targeting. They let you answer questions like "how many of our CRM contacts saw Partner X's ads?" without sharing your customer list. For B2B, clean rooms enable co-marketing measurement and joint account targeting between tech partners.
Example
A SaaS company and a media publisher set up a Snowflake Clean Room. The SaaS company loads their CRM account list. The publisher loads their subscriber data. The clean room matches records and returns aggregate overlap metrics ("340 of your target accounts are active subscribers") without either party accessing the other's full dataset.