When Apple announced new regulations, HOMER Learning’s entire product model was put in jeopardy:

“At first, it looked like we were completely cut off from working with any third-party tool,” says Ripal Sanghani, Senior Product Manager.

That meant no more marketing analytics, product analytics, even data storage.

New Regulations Threaten Business

HOMER Learning offers learning products for kids ages 2-8 and is designed for families who care about investing in early childhood education. Not only are their products fun, they are also intrinsically motivating, sparking curiosity by personalizing their programs to each child’s individual interests and passions. With thousands of 5-star reviews from parents, their approach is working: kids are learning to read, imagine and create—and they’re having fun doing it. 

But in 2019, Apple’s iOS store changed its compliance guidelines for businesses operating in the Kid's category.

“Right away, we began looking for an enterprise-grade alternative to our existing integration platform that could connect server-side with third-parties like Braze, Optimizely, Appsflyer, and others, as well as internal data storage,” says Ripal Sanghani, Senior Product Manager. “At first, it looked like we were completely cut off from working with any third-party tool.” 

While data security is paramount, it’s user data that enables HOMER to pursue its mission of giving kids the best educational start possible through personalized, fun, and proven learning products. There had to be a way to use the data—for good.

Fortunately, they weren’t prohibited from collecting Identifiers for Advertisers (IFDA) as long as it was only sent to their first-party, private-cloud endpoint within their domain. That meant they could then use IFDA internally to create a match with another form of attribution identifier to send to third parties, without ever passing on any personally identifiable information (PII) from the child. 

The question was, how could they control the data from the moment of collection and make it impossible for data to pass on to a third party until it had been cleaned and processed according to HOMER’s (and Apple’s) standards? It soon became clear that the only real way to eliminate risk was to centralize data onto a single platform and deploy it on their private cloud. 

The Power of Private Cloud Data Rating

With MetaRouter’s secure data-routing platform available for private cloud deployment, HOMER could own their entire data infrastructure. MetaRouter filters out and hashes sensitive or customer-requested data before it’s even processed and gets rid of third-party tags that collect sensitive PII by re-integrating those third parties server-side. The modular, cloud- and message queue-agnostic platform fit neatly into HOMER’s current system, which made the transition seamless. 

“Once we discovered Meta-Router, it was a no-brainer,” says Ripal Sanghani. “We could continue tracking the events we need to improve our product experience and understand our users—and confidently meet every new regulation, ensuring the utmost privacy for the families who love our apps.” 

MetaRouter actually makes it impossible for data to pass on to a third party (including MetaRouter itself!) unless you’ve decided to communicate it, providing HOMER and others the highest level of control possible. Now HOMER educates while protecting their users’ data.

Sound familiar? See how MetaRouter could solve your challenges with data. Share your pain points with us at hello@metarouter.io. We'll respond right away!

Photo by Janelle Hiroshige on Unsplash