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User ID Hashing

  • 7 January 2022
  • 6 replies
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Does the Identify API allow any sort of hashing when provided two different identifying pieces of information? I’m currently setting the user ID to be the unique ID that our application uses, but we’re currently having many types of users use the same super log in. Are there any out of the box functions that allow the pairing of user ID and another piece of identifying information to further segment these users or would it be better to use a separate hashing system? Thanks!

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Best answer by Denis Holmes 12 January 2022, 11:18

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Hi @carissa.mok ,

Thanks for writing into the Community!

The Identify API does not provide any hashing functionality. You can set a User ID with only the Device ID. So I think a separate hashing system would be required. However, could you expand a little more on what it is you are trying to achieve? I am not fully understanding the scenario at this point. Can you elaborate a little more and I can try and see if we can find an appropriate solution. Thank you!

Kind Regards,
Denis

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Hi Denis, 

Thanks for getting back to me. We do currently have unique user IDs, but many of our users use the same super user log-in in one of our testing environments, so we have users that belong to different banks all under one user profile in Amplitude. I’m trying to separate these users into different profiles on Amplitude’s side by adding another piece of uniquely identifiable information alongside the user ID—maybe something like bank name or initial referring domain.

Userlevel 6
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Hi @carissa.mok ,

 

Thanks for the reply! Indeed, I think in this case you should add a user property to identify the bank they are with. However, I am not sure if the super user-login would ve the best tracking of analytics as everything gets locked into the one profile. Regardless, you would need to add something to identfy the bank they are with. Bank name should be more than enough.

 

If you wanted to, in the future, remove the super user login (you don’t have to of course, but JIC), you could use the Export API, clean the event data and then r-import into a new project. 

 

I hope this helps! Let me know :)

 

Kind Regards,
Denis

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Hi @Denis Holmes

We currently do have bank name tracked as a user property, which is how I was able to see that there were multiple banks all coming in under one user account in different sessions. But in order to segment these banks into individual users, I was still thinking of hashing user ID with bank name, alongside with tracking bank name as a user property. What are your thoughts on that or is there a better method?

Thanks!

Userlevel 6
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HI @carissa.mok ,

 

If you were to hash the User ID with the bank name and have a user property tracking so, then I believe this would work just fine! As long as you can identify the user through that  shouldn’t be any problem and tracking the users should proceed as normal :) 

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Ok perfect, thanks!

 

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