Glimpse is a privacy-preserving technology that allows data to be queried without being revealed. It has particular application in allowing services to be personalised without needing consumers’ personal data to be shared.

A prominent use case is allowing personalised advertising. The current system of programmatic advertising relies on the illegal and unnecessary harvesting of consumer data, which is then shared with hundreds of data brokers and adtech companies without adequate consent from the consumer, or fair value exchange.

Glimpse allows these valuable personalised services to operate in a privacy-preserving manner, complying with regulations that are based on the GDPR or CPRA. In advertising, it provides a cookieless, compliant way to conduct targeting, measurement and retargeting.

Our technology is a decentralised system, in which sensitive data is held securely at rest in individual data vaults at the edge of an untrusted network. Queries may be sent to vaults, with responses returned through an anonymizing network intermediary. Zero-knowledge cryptography is employed to assure the integrity of the response, without revealing the underlying data. The system is fully anonymous, and has been scrutinised to legal standards by UK regulators and data protection experts. It is patent-pending, having received a positive opinion internationally.

Glimpse’s commercial activities are currently paused until the market is ready to shift to a more private model. Regulators globally are beginning to enforce the law, which will force the adoption of such technologies. We welcome interest in our technology at hello@glimpseprotocol.io.