Privacy Preserving Opinion Publishing System for Opinion Poll

Abstract

Public opinion is the belief or thought of a group of people regarding a particular topic, especially on politics, religion, social issues, demographic diversity, etc. The opinion of the individual may be sensitive since it reflects the perception, understanding, belief, conflict, and desire of that individual. The traditional mechanisms of collecting public opinions (e.g., survey, questionnaire, interviewer, mailing) are often compromising individual's privacy. Those mechanisms do not anonymize the individual's identity. Therefore people are often abstained from expressing their rational opinions. The electronic opinion collection systems are designed with a central server that keeps all the user's profiles, which may be linked the opinions, thereby compromises the privacy. In this paper, we present a multiparty opinion collecting and publishing protocol that preserves the user's identity. The protocol does not rely on any trusted third party (e.g. central server). It rather forms quorums to execute the process. Party independently cannot learn the individual's opinions. Moreover, the protocol publishes the opinions anonymously, thereby preserves the privacy of the individuals.