This article contains content about advanced functionality within the Evident platform. If you have not already familiarized yourself with base functionality, we recommend doing so first. Base functionality is sufficient for the majority of use cases and scenarios that you will encounter as an Evident customer. That being said, there may be some scenarios or use cases where you need a deeper understanding of the Evident platform.
Output Attributes
In this article, we explain what an attribute is and why this matters for the Evident platform. When you create a request, most of the time, it will include a service. For every service that we run, there is a list of encrypted information that you can see or view as a result of the service. These are the attributes, or more specifically, the output attributes.
An output attribute is a piece of encrypted information that we've identified as something you might want to see, and we've built product functionality that enables you to do so.
Since our company's mission is to protect both businesses and consumers from unnecessary data exposure, we require that a business deliberately ask the Evident platform for whichever output attributes they want to see, rather than exposing the information by default.
In technological terms, an output is defined as "the information produced by a computer." This is where the term output attribute comes from.
The way that you use the Evident platform to show you information about a specific user is by including the desired output attributes, or pieces of encrypted information, on a request. This tells the Evident platform which pieces of information to un-encrypt and display when the service finishes running and the request is complete.
Input Attributes
Within the Evident platform, there is another kind of information that we must leverage as part of performing a verification or service. This is the information that we collect from a user. It is called an input attribute. In technological terms, an input is defined as the "information fed into a data processing system or computer." This is where the term input attribute comes from.In other words, an input attribute is the information that must be fed into the Evident platform in order to enable the Evident platform to produce some result.
How Input and Output Attributes Work Together
Let's look at a real life example of input attributes and output attributes to help illustrate this concept. As part of a Pro Background Check Evident will need to collect:
- name
- date of birth
- authorization and disclosure
- social security number
As part of the background check, we produce:
- records associated with the individual
- Clear or Policy Violations Found
We also provide you the option to view:
- name
- date of birth
Therefore, the input attributes for a Pro Background Check are:
- name
- date of birth
- authorization and disclosure
- social security number
And the output attributes from the Pro Background Check that are possible are:
- name
- date of birth
- records associated with the individual
- Clear or Policy Violations Found result
As you can see, some of the input attributes that we collect from the user (name, date of birth) have been made viewable as output attributes as part of the Pro Background Check service. Evident also produces the new output attributes (Clear/Policy Violations Found & the records associated with an individual). In addition, some pieces of information that we collect and use are not viewable using the Evident platform (Authorization and Disclosure).
We may or may not some input attributes available as an output attribute. Since all the information in Evident's platform is encrypted, we must deliberately build functionality to un-encrypt information that we want to be available to you. Therefore, just because we collect the information to run a verification does not mean it is always available to view.
Usually, there are certain 'minimum' pieces of information that you will want to always want to view from a particular service. We try to always make these available to you during your set up.
These are usually:
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- the name of the individual (or business)
- the result of the service (as a pass/fail response)
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