Hashing Personally Identifiable Information (PII) in email clicks to Marketo landing pages

[Megan_Koelemay]

Hello all, 

As a best practice, we're trying to avoid putting lead tokens with PII (like first name, last name, email address and phone number) in an email link that goes to a Marketo landing page.  The landing page has a form with fields that we ideally want to pre-populate with these personal details so the customer doesn't have to fill in all their info themselves (since we already have it!).  

Example URL:

https://www.testpagewithform.com/?First={{lead.First Name}}&Last={{lead.Last Name}}&Email={{lead.Email Address}}&Phone={{lead.Phone Number}}.......

So I *think* what I'm after is how to hash these fields so PII isn't included when someone clicks through the link, nor when they submit the form on the landing page and it goes back into Marketo. 

Is that possible out-of-the-box in Marketo?

Thanks!

Megan

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

You can’t both hash data for privacy and retrieve the original value to prefill fields at the same time!

Hashing is not reversible. It eliminates the original value completely, though you can still compare a specific known value with the hash, i.e. you can tell if the original value was sandy@example.com, but if it wasn’t sandy@example.com you can’t know what other thing it was.

However, the above is just for learning purposes. You don’t need to include this data in the link at all. Just use Pre-Fill. That’s what it’s designed to do. The autogenerated mkt_tok (which doesn’t contain PII) is used to retrieve the original values from Marketo and fill the fields.