Google Working on Tool to Gather Stats While Preserving Privacy

 Dennis Fisher  October 31, 2014 , 10:30 amGoogle is working on a new system that enables the company to collect randomized information about the way that users are affected by unwanted software on their machines, without gathering identifying data about the users.
The system is known as RAPPOR (Randomized Aggregatable Privacy-Preserving Ordinal Response) and Google currently is testing it in Chrome. The company’s engineers are hoping to use RAPPOR to aggregate data on the problems affecting users while still preserving the privacy of each individual.
“To understand RAPPOR, consider the following example. Let’s say you wanted to count how many of your online friends were dogs, while respecting the maxim that, on the Internet, nobody should know you’re a dog. To do this, you could ask each friend to answer the question ‘Are you a dog?’ in the following way. Each friend should flip a coin in secret, and answer the question truthfully if the coin came up heads; but, if the coin came up tails, that friend should always say ‘Yes’ regardles
 
 
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