Unlocking Deeper Video Insights: A Closer Look at ParOne's TPUT System
- Taz Nakonecznyj
- October 15, 2023
Welcome to the latest update from ParOne, the golf industry's favorite video platform! September and October 2023 has been an exciting couple of months for us as we continue to expand and improve our services. This month, we put some additional touches on our data and analytics pipeline.
TPUT
ParOne’s TPUT (Tee to Putt User Token) enables partners to track video, ad, and call-to-action metrics on a per-user basis. You may provide a user email or some other UUID via the tput
parameter.
GDPR Compliance
Data privacy and security are paramount concerns. ParOne offers a robust and GDPR-compliant solution for hashing emails for analytics tracking, ensuring the protection of sensitive user information while adhering to stringent data protection regulations. ParOne safeguards email addresses while remaining compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
ParOne’s approach goes a step further in compliance with GDPR by not storing personally identifiable information (PII) in its databases. Instead, only email address hashes are retained. This data minimization strategy aligns seamlessly with GDPR’s principles, which emphasize the reduction of unnecessary data processing and storage. As a result, the risk of data breaches and privacy violations is significantly reduced, as the actual email addresses remain untraceable, even within ParOne's own systems.
ParOne utilizes industry-best practices and state-of-the-art cryptographic algorithms to transform email addresses into irreversible hashes. This method ensures that the original email addresses cannot be reverse-engineered from the generated hash, guaranteeing a high level of data security. The hashing process does not involve the storage of actual email addresses, effectively minimizing the risk of data breaches and privacy violations. Furthermore, ParOne’s implementation adheres to GDPR’s strict guidelines by ensuring data minimization, consent-based processing, and robust security measures, all of which are fundamental principles of the regulation.
Why we chose to Hash instead of Encryption
Encryption algorithms take input and a secret key to generate random output called a ciphertext. This operation is reversible. Anyone who knows or obtains the secret key can decrypt the ciphertext and read the original input.
Hashing functions are not reversible. Hashing performs a one-way transformation on an email or UUID, turning the email into another string, called the hashed email. “One-way” means that it is practically impossible to go the other way – to turn the hashed email back into the original email. In authentication systems, when users send ParOne the email, the application code passes that email through a hashing function and stores the result in the database.
Hashing is a cryptographic process that can be used to validate the authenticity and integrity of various types of input. It is widely used in authentication systems to avoid storing plaintext emails in databases but is also used to validate files, documents, and other types of data. Hashing is almost always preferable to encryption when storing emails inside databases because in the event of a compromise attackers will not get access to the plaintext emails.
Integration
To pass in a user's email or another UUID, simply add an attribute to any ParOne video player code snippet via the tput
<!-- Pass in a user email -->
<parone-video-block tput="user@domain.com" />
Now more than 100 metrics per video view
At ParOne, we're always looking for ways to improve our data analytics from video. ParOne now tracks over 100 metrics per video broken in four categories:
- Per Video: ParOne tracks 26 metrics per video. See (here) for a full list.
- Per Ad: ParOne tracks 14 metrics per ad. See (here) for a full list.
- Per User: ParOne tracks 41 metrics per user See (here) for a full list.
- Per Call to Action: ParOne tracks 26 metrics per call to action. See (here) for more details.
Building a user experience that enables our partners to find the exact level of metrics they need was no easy task. ParOne rebuilt it's entire Analytics and Data pipeline to ensure this level of robustness. Users can select the metrics they're seeking and ParOne will display a charts over time as well as a table of information and of course, ParOne's commitment to user experience remains unquestioned: We still output all of our analytics via API.
So, there you have it. Some of the features we’ve been working on this month! These capabilities will allow you to understand your level of video detail greater than ever and we hope you like it.