SHA-256 an email address Link in Velocity

[Harry_Rashid]

Hi Sanford,

Not sure answer to on any of those, I was told that the email address needs to encrypted as it is personal data, below is what they mentioned - 

Yes, encryption is required as that is personal data and we would want to make sure CNVR does not ingest those due to legal reasons.

Hope you still can help.

Thanks again.

[SanfordWhiteman]

It sounds to me like you can use the Marketo Unique Code in this case. It cannot be reversed into an email address; only within your Marketo db is it significant. Debatably, it's even more secure than the hash, since you can't test known email addresses against known Unique Codes, there's no correspondence.

Note SHA-256 isn't encryption, it's a nonreversable hash, so their terminology is off.

[Harry_Rashid]

I'm lost in all this process, not sure which way to go.

Do you have example how to use Unique codes or will best option be coding some velocity using Base64.

Thanks

[Harry_Rashid]

Hi Sanford,

This is what conversant has come back to me with - 

The main purpose of email tagging is to help conversant identify Farnell customers and be able to reach (Display ads) them online within different devices. The reason for SHA256 is because the customer file we receive from your company is hashed out with SHA256. Having SHA256 on the email tagging, we can then map the hashed email address to a User in conversant since those are in the customer file as well. Also, just to clarify, we don’t reverse the hashes to its normal email address as those become PII information.

Not sure what to make of this.

[Tony_Mayse]

Since you're already creating a the hash to provide to Conversant for matching, it seems to me that the easiest solution would be to create a custom field in Marketo, populate values using a list import ( Import a List of People - Marketo Docs - Product Documentation ), and then include the custom field value in your links.

That technique uses data you already have and avoids the complication of webhooks. The downside, of course, is that the fields need to be kept up-to-date. You'd need to update field values each time you provide a new file to Conversant. The same can be accomplished using the API which you might allow you to incorporate Marketo updates into the process that creates the file in the first place ( https://developers.marketo.com/rest-api/bulk-import/bulk-custom-object-import/  )

The best import performance will be accomplished by only including newly acquired leads in each import, of course.

[Tony_Mayse]

I don't believe any of Marketo's Launchpoint partners offer a hashing webhook or service that's applicable. I'm hoping that will change as that would make this a lot easier.

In the meantime: It would make sense to use a Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) provider like Microsoft Azure Functions to implement a custom webhook without the need to maintain a server infrastructure. Azure Functions—Develop Faster With Serverless Compute | Microsoft Azure 

You could use a PowerShell script to create the hash: Get-FileHash

[SanfordWhiteman]

I don't believe any of Marketo's Launchpoint partners offer a hashing webhook or service that's applicable.

Oh, there's one. And has been for years.

This is getting quite silly, but those are the rules.

[Harry_Rashid]

Thanks Tony! but not sure I have the knowledge to this.