Survey participants often feel reluctant to share their true experience because they are worried about potential retaliation in case their responses are identified (e.g., data leakage). This is especially the case for sensitive survey questions such as those asking about sexual harassment in the workplace. As a result, survey administrators (e.g., company management, researchers) often get inaccurate representation of the reality, which makes it hard to devise an appropriate course of action.
safely-report is a survey web application that can provide plausible deniability to survey respondents by recording survey responses with noise. For instance, when asking a worker whether they have been harassed by a manager, the application can be set up to record the answer "yes" with a probability of 20% even if the worker responds "no". This makes it nearly impossible to correctly identify which responses (of all those recorded "yes") are truthful reports — even if the survey results are leaked. Yet, the survey designer can still deduce (probabilistically) the proportion of truthful reports because they know the level of noise that had been injected (20% in this example). Consequently, survey participants feel more safe and become more willing to share their true experience, which has been confirmed by a relevant study.