Google is applying a surveying technique from the 1960s to a project that aims to collect data about users’ computers without compromising their privacy.

The project is nicknamed RAPPOR, which stands for Randomized Aggregatable Privacy-Preserving Ordinal Response. Google plans to present a paper on it next week at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security. 

RAPPOR is intended to collect statistics about software, such as security flaws, but in a way that doesn’t expose sensitive information. It can do that by applying a technique used for randomized response surveys, wrote Ulfar Erlingsson, tech lead manager for security research.

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