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DatabricksSridhar Sundaresan, Suvan KaulExplainer
How Stagwell built privacy-safe ID matching on Databricks
Summary
Stagwell built a Databricks Marketplace App to let brands match first-party records against its Identity Spine without sending raw customer data outside their own workspaces. It combines Databricks Clean Rooms, Unity Catalog, Jobs and Notebooks, Delta Sharing, and a React/Express interface. Workspace OAuth and On-Behalf-Of authorization enforce the user's Unity Catalog permissions, while separate service principals and a scoped personal access token support app and clean-room operations. Within the clean room, a packaged notebook joins brand data with the Identity Spine, resolves multiple identifiers, and computes match rates, coverage metrics, and household and consumer IDs; results include aggregated audience insights for activation, while raw customer data and proprietary matching code remain separated.
Context
Brands' first-party data is fragmented, while traditional identity matching requires exporting customer records to third-party platforms. That process can expose PII, create compliance risks, and delay results, even as third-party cookies become unreliable and identity stitching grows more complex.
Approach / What changed
Stagwell packaged its identity matching capabilities as a Databricks Marketplace App. The application runs in the brand's workspace, uses OAuth, On-Behalf-Of authorization, service principals, and a scoped personal access token, and executes a packaged Clean Room notebook against the brand's data and Stagwell's Identity Spine. Unity Catalog governs access, while Delta Sharing delivers results.
Takeaways
Marketplace Apps keep the consumer's data inside its Databricks environment while distributing proprietary application code in a containerized, opaque form.
On-Behalf-Of authorization makes the app operate under the logged-in user's Unity Catalog permissions, including ACLs, row filters, and column masks.
Packaged Clean Rooms remove the standard notebook approval step, allowing brands to install the app and run identity matching in minutes rather than weeks.
Source and freshness
- Source
- databricks.com
- Published
- Added to Yomu
- Last updated
Summaries are generated from the original by a language model. Check the original before relying on it.
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