Abstract: Data security and privacy are improved by a client providing a hashed version of collected data to a remote analysis service, and having the analysis service determine the relevancy of the data from the hashes before requesting the plaintext of the data. In one example, a browser plug-in obtains data which is divided into overlapping three-character sequences, and the sequences are hashed to produce a sequence of hashes. The sequence of hashes is sent by the plug-in to the remote service, which uses the hashes to determine if the associated data is relevant to the analysis performed by the remote service, without requiring access to the associated plaintext. After making the determination, the remote service may request that relevant data be provided to the service in plaintext form, while data that is not relevant need not be sent to the remote service.

Abstract: Data security and privacy are improved by a client providing a hashed version of collected data to a remote analysis service, and having the analysis service determine the relevancy of the data from the hashes before requesting the plaintext of the data. In one example, a browser plug-in obtains data which is divided into overlapping three-character sequences, and the sequences are hashed to produce a sequence of hashes. The sequence of hashes is sent by the plug-in to the remote service, which uses the hashes to determine if the associated data is relevant to the analysis performed by the remote service, without requiring access to the associated plaintext. After making the determination, the remote service may request that relevant data be provided to the service in plaintext form, while data that is not relevant need not be sent to the remote service.