Google RAPPOR Project Aims To Preserve User Privacy While Collecting Software Data

Google RAPPOR Project Aims To Preserve User Privacy While Collecting Software Data

According a report published on the Google Online Security Blog, Google is always concerned about the security of its users. And they are trying their best to maintain it even while they are collecting software statistics from user's system for better security, bug hunting and improving all over user experience. 

To make it go well, they have launched a project named RAPPOR(Randomized Aggregatable Privacy-Preserving Ordinal Response) which provides a new state-of-the-art, privacy-preserving way to learn software statistics. 

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The idea of RAPPOR is based on the concept of randomized response.RAPPOR is intended to collect software data like security flaws,but in a way that does not expose sensitive information.

According to  Úlfar Erlingsson, Tech Lead Manager at Google Security Research, the guarantees of Differential Privacy is hardly seen in practice although it is considered as the strongest form of Privacy.RAPPOR work in a way which will help it to achieve that guarantee. 

How will RAPPOR work??

To describe the working method of RAPPOR, Ulfar said,

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” regardless. Then you could get a good estimate of the true count from the greater-than-half fraction of your friends that answered “Yes”. However, you still wouldn’t know which of your friends was a dog: each answer “Yes” would most likely be due to that friend’s coin flip coming up tails.

RAPPOR builds on the above concept, allowing software to send reports that are effectively indistinguishable from the results of random coin flips and are free of any unique identifiers. However, by aggregating the reports we can learn the common statistics that are shared by many users. We’re currently testing the use of RAPPOR in Chrome, to learn statistics about how unwanted software is hijacking users’ settings.

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Official Release of RAPPOR:

Google is planning to publish RAPPOR on ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security.

Ulfar said that RAPPOR will be a Open-Source Project which will let others to involve themselves into the technology by reporting,testing and analyzing the results.

A 14-page Paper on RAPPOR is available and Corresponding code is also available on GitHub.