CEO of Scuba Analytics Tony Ayaz described data analytics and privacy as “peanut butter and jelly.” A company cannot be data-driven unless they are simultaneously complying with existing and upcoming privacy regulations.

Scuba Analytics—founded by the very team that created Facebook’s analytics engine—aims to redefine customer data analytics. Rather than focusing on third-party data, which is aggregated by platforms that are not original collectors of the data, the company cultivates real-time insights using data directly obtained from customers. 

A Subscriber Economy 

Today, business revenues, decisions and innovations are largely driven by insights from data—specifically, data from their users. 

“Anyone who has millions of subscribers or users—it could be an insurance app, a dating app, an enterprise SaaS company like Asana or Salesforce—they want to understand the analytics from a product intelligence [perspective],” Ayaz said. He added that an understanding of retention and customer journeys are paramount for such companies, and often depends on their capacity to leverage their marketing and product analytics.

But using such data is getting harder as companies encounter privacy and data security regulations alongside obstacles to third-party data. 

Scuba Analytics—which works with companies such as Microsoft, Twitter and Salesforce—creates actionable digital intelligence from securely obtained customer data to improve the users’ experiences on these platforms. 

Leaving Cookies Behind: Scuba Leverages First-Party Data

Countries across the world are increasingly passing laws and regulations protecting user rights and privacy. With the EU confronting Amazon and Meta over GDPR violations, and U.S. states releasing regulations like California’s Consumer Protection Regulation Act (CPRA) and Delaware’s Online Privacy Protection Act (DOPPA), the tech ecosystem is seeing a shift toward a privacy-first world. 

The proliferation of privacy laws is directly impacting companies’ ability to leverage third-party cookies. In 2020 for instance, Apple banned third-party cookie collection on its Safari browser, while Google announced similar plans for Chrome by 2023. These changes have made it harder for brands to track and respond to consumer preferences. 

As a result, first-party data—information collected directly from a company’s customers and owned by that company—is becoming increasingly relevant. This data can be culled from social media, email subscribers, website visits and more, and is instantly available for in-house use. 

“Where you can no longer track people off cookies, you have to really look at who these people are and map their journey—that’s something that analytics plays a key role in,” Ayaz said. 

Currently, most companies lack the technology to leverage such data. Scuba Analytics is an analytics platform that caters to the use of first-party data through a single-solution interface that sidesteps third-party data vendors. According to Ayaz, most firms often rely on external vendors or tools to store, clean, analyze and secure data, which creates risks of data breaches and makes complying with shifting privacy regulations challenging. Scuba Analytics’ privacy-first tool eliminates risks by instead collecting encrypted data behind firewalls and directly storing it in a company’s environment. This makes data secure and easily scalable, translating to real-time insights and avoiding organizational delays. 

Scuba’s Approach: A Holistic View of Data

Even though Ayaz noted that first-party day is key, he said it can be useless without the “right level of enrichment across analytics.” In other words, it’s equally important to look at collected data holistically in order to construct a customer’s journey with a product or company. While customer insights are generally limited to one channel or dashboard at a time, Scuba Analytics integrates streams of data from multiple silos, crafting a user’s engagement from different data points in a single-view platform. 

Ayaz said that Scuba is now focusing on enhancing their automation capabilities, both on the level of data through self-correcting features, as well as on a higher level across datasets and countries. 

Going forward, the team aims to pave the way for the large-scale collection and enrichment of data on a global scale—all without risking personally identifiable information.

Learn more about Scuba here.

ABOUT THE WRITER

Freya Savla is a Tech Innovation Fellow from Yale University, where she is exploring the political economy through the lens of economics, policy and journalism.

Contact Freya at freya@identityreview.com.

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