Before statistics are released, they are carefully analyzed to minimize the possibility that they could somehow be used to obtain information about you. If you have any concerns about the confidentiality of information you are asked to give, you should discuss them with the interviewer. If the interviewer can't immediately answer your questions satisfactorily, he or she should be willing to refer you to someone in the survey organization who can. You are entitled to receive assurances that the information you give will be carefully safeguarded and will not be used improperly. A statistician is interested only in the size and shape of the forest and has not the slightest professional interest in any particular tree.
Most surveys collect information from a sample of a larger population group.
If correct sampling and statistical procedures are applied, and if those in the sample respond accurately, then the responses from the sample can tell us how the entire group thinks or reacts. In a legitimate survey, there is no single answer that the interviewer wants to hear. The survey seeks to describe reactions, not to shape them. In the process of trying to describe a group or its attitudes, the statistician does temporarily need to know where a particular response came from. Long before the final statistical result is reached and published, however, any connection between the what and the where from should be severed.