Adobe Launch extension: Differential Privacy

About 2 weeks ago, I released a new extension for Adobe Experience Platform Launch (or "Adobe Launch" for short): Differential Privacy.

In the current era of digital analytics where user privacy is becoming more and more important, what with governmental regulations and the like, it is increasingly important for analysts to consider protecting their users' privacy while still being able to do their analytical work with a fair amount of precision.

That brings us to differential privacy. It's not a new idea, but it has become more prevalent in recent times. Essentially, it allows data analysts to be confident about their data at the aggregate level, but not too confident at the individual level. In that way, user privacy can be controlled for while still allowing good quality insights to be derived.

For my extension, I implemented a very simple level of differential privacy: given a list of items and a random number, return either a pre-selected item (if the random number if met) or a random item from the list.

Setting up a differential privacy data element in Adobe Launch

This approach is inspired by Mark Hansen's "Differential privacy, an easy case".

If you discover any errors with the extension, or if you have a neat idea that I should incorporate, please open an issue at my GitHub repository.