Data clean rooms have arrived to BigQuery after what seems like forever. Clean rooms were launched in preview on August 2023 with limited usage. Now everyone can use clean rooms in BigQuery.
The main usage of data clean rooms is to separate first-party data and third-party data. Typically first-party data is customer data, order data, or product data. Third-party data can be ad data, demographic data, or order data from third-party sources such as credit card processors. Only specific data types are moved into the data clean room without knowing the source of the data.
Clean rooms facilitate data governance because each party controls the data entering the data clean room. So data customers have designated as private or personally identifiable information (PII) won’t enter the clean room. Similarly, ad copy and trade secrets can be limited in the clean room with only an ad identifier to keep analysis focused on data insights and trends.
I think this is a great step forward for Google to address its lack of data privacy and governance. You can use data from any place in GCP in the clean room and know the data has privacy protections. You will only see the data customers have authorized to use and combine the data to deliver insights not found in separate platforms..
More information can be found at https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/data-clean-rooms