Secure Surveys

Sangyoon Park, Research Software Engineer

Overview of the safely-report architecture.

Survey participants often feel reluctant to share their true experience because they are worried about potential retaliation in case their responses are identified. This is especially the case for sensitive survey questions such as those asking about sexual harassment in the workplace. Safely-report is an open source survey application that provides plausible deniability to survey respondents by recording survey responses with noise, making it nearly impossible to identify which responses are truthful reports — even if the survey results are leaked. Critically, the application injects statistical noise in a manner that encourages respondents to report truthfully while preserving the ability of survey designers to perform efficient statistical inference.

PIs: Sylvain Chassang and Laura Boudreau

GitHub