skip to main content
10.1145/1655188.1655205acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesccsConference Proceedingsconference-collections
short-paper

Plinko: polling with a physical implementation of a noisy channel

Published: 09 November 2009 Publication History

Abstract

We give a practical polling protocol that is immune to tampering by either the pollster or the responder. It preserves responders' privacy in the manner of Warner's Randomized Response Technique, is easily understood without any knowledge of cryptography, and does not require the use of computers or other electronics. The key is to use physical noisy channels commonly found in lottery or game-show settings, which can deliver the desired properties without relying on a mechanism which is unfamiliar to the responder.

References

[1]
Andris Ambainis, Markus Jakobsson, and Helger Lipmaa. Cryptographic randomized response techniques. CoRR, cs.CC/0302025, 2003.
[2]
Amy Biesterfeld. The Price (or Probability) Is Right. Journal of Statistics Education, 9(3), 2001.
[3]
Susie Lanier and Sharon Barrs. Plinko: Probability from a tv game. http://mathdemos.gcsu.edu/mathdemos/plinko/. Accessed August 2009.
[4]
N.S. Mangat. An improved randomized response strategy. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series B (Methodological), 56(1):93--95, 1994.
[5]
N.S. Mangat and R. Singh. An alternative randomized response procedure. Biometrika, 77:439--442, 1990.
[6]
Tal Moran and Moni Naor. Polling with Physical Envelopes: A Rigorous Analysis of a Human-Centric Protocol. Advances in Cryptology -- EUROCRYPT 2006, pages 88--108, 2006.
[7]
PromoQuip. Plinko boards specs and online ordering. http://www.promoquip.com/plinko.htm. Accessed August 2009.
[8]
N.J. Scheers and C. Mitchell Dayton. Improved Estimation of Academic Cheating Behaviour Using the Randomized Response Technique. Research in Higher Education, 26(1):61--69, March 1987.
[9]
Stanley L. Warner. Randomized Response: A Survey Technique for Eliminating Evasive Answer Bias. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 60(309):63--69, March 1965.

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
WPES '09: Proceedings of the 8th ACM workshop on Privacy in the electronic society
November 2009
130 pages
ISBN:9781605587837
DOI:10.1145/1655188
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 09 November 2009

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. polling
  2. privacy
  3. randomized response technique

Qualifiers

  • Short-paper

Conference

CCS '09
Sponsor:

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 106 of 355 submissions, 30%

Upcoming Conference

CCS '25

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • 0
    Total Citations
  • 119
    Total Downloads
  • Downloads (Last 12 months)3
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)1
Reflects downloads up to 20 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media