Allowing non-identifying information disclosure in citizen opinion evaluation

Abstract

The continuous participation of citizens in the decisional processes of the community through the submission of their opinions is a key factor of e-democracy. To do this, it appears very promising the use of lightweight e-voting systems relying on existing social networks, as a good way to solve the trade-off among security, usability and scalability requirements. Among the other security features, anonymity of citizens (i.e., secreteness) should be guaranteed, at least to be sure that the action of people is actually free from conditioning. However, the decisional process would be better driven if the opinions of citizens were mapped to social, economic, working, personal, non-identifying attributes. In this paper, by extending a previous solution working on existing social networks, we overcome the above limit by re-interpreting the classical concept of secreteness in such a way that a preference expressed by a citizen can be related to a number of (certified) attributes chosen by the citizen herself, yet keeping her anonymity. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.