Why Does PII Protection Require Both Machine Intelligence and Human Expertise?

• Automated systems are essential for tracking the thousands of third-party code changes that occur continuously across enterprise websites, but machine intelligence alone cannot distinguish every real threat from routine noise. Without AI-driven filtering, monitoring systems would flood teams with hundreds or thousands of false alerts daily. With it, inconsequential changes like timestamp updates are automatically discounted, leaving only genuinely suspicious activity for review.
• Human expertise is required to evaluate the gray-area threats that machine systems flag but cannot definitively classify. When the automated system identifies a suspicious tag change, experienced analysts investigate to determine whether it represents a real data leak, a vendor misconfiguration, or benign behavior. Confirmed threats trigger immediate client notification; non-threats are logged and cleared without the client needing to act.
• The augmented intelligence model eliminates the operational burden of dashboard monitoring and false alarm triage for marketing and privacy teams. Instead of requiring clients to configure rule-based scanners or sort through alerts, the combined machine-and-human approach delivers only actionable findings, allowing teams to focus on marketing performance rather than tag ecosystem surveillance.

Due to “artificial intelligence” (or AI), machines are replacing human employees in manufacturing, service delivery, the financial industry and recruitment. In fact, it is estimated that 85 million jobs will be replaced by machines with AI by 2025. But augmented intelligence (IA, also commonly referred to as intelligence amplification or cognitive augmentation) is growing, too. IA refers to machines that enhance human decision-making, rather than replacing it, and is at the core of the Vault JS approach to protecting your customer’s personal identifiable information. That’s because providing solid PII protection requires both advanced machines and real, talented people, working together.

The Vault JS system continually tests enterprise websites from the outside. Using machine intelligence, the system tracks tag behavior and compares it with previous tests. Any changes in behavior are flagged.

The use of automated systems for this work is crucial. There are thousands of code changes, the majority of which come from third-party vendors, and in which you are likely completely unaware. Tracking these continual alterations would be impossible to do manually. But machines are ideal for laborious and repetitive tasks like these. Our automated system tracks and identifies all these code changes, and evaluates their impact.

Machine tracking, without artificial intelligence, would be unable to easily differentiate the consequential from the inconsequential. These machines would flag every minor change, littering your inbox with hundreds, if not thousands, of alerts every day. But our system is smart enough to ignore those irrelevant changes, and quickly discounts them. However, there are some codes that post a real threat to your PII protection, and there are others that fall in a gray area. That’s where the human element is necessary, and why our augmented intelligence system is so beneficial.

When our system flags a potential tag or file problem, our team is notified. Our experienced professionals are all well-versed in studying and recognizing issues. They quickly investigate any suspicious activity to determine if it is truly a threat. If it is not, that threat is logged and cleared without our client even having to worry about it. But if it’s a real threat, you are immediately alerted so you can take action.

With the Vault JS approach, there are no complicated dashboards for you to constantly monitor. No excess false alarms. With our Vault JS augmented intelligence tag system, we deliver PII protection and digital marketing assurance two-fold—with the all-encompassing crawling of advanced machine technology and backed by real human experience. It’s a combination you won’t find anywhere else, and why Vault JS is the best way to ensure you can use your martech tools with assurance.

For the ultimate in PII protection, contact Vault JS and get the benefits of machine and human intelligence today.

Josh Manion
CEO and Co-Founder, Vault JS

Before founding Vault JS, he created and led Ensighten, pioneering the tag management category and earning patents for innovations in how third-party JavaScript is managed on enterprise websites. That close-up view of the security and privacy risks embedded in the Martech ecosystem led directly to the creation of Vault JS.