Patent ID: 7844663

Claim:
A method for gathering information and statistics from a community of agent nodes in a network, comprising: generating a process request, including: a rule for discovering each of the agent nodes in the community; a rule for accessing local information stored on each of the agent nodes, the local information representing at least activities conducted by end users at each of the agent nodes; and a set of rules operable for: classifying data comprising the local information at each of the agent nodes; and developing a cumulative profile resulting from the classifying, the cumulative profile including generic information that is descriptive of collective activities conducted by the end users; the cumulative profile devoid of information that personally identifies any of the end users; transmitting the process request to a first agent node in the community; and preventing extraction of specified information at any location in a transmission path followed by the process request among the agent nodes, the preventing including: pre-populating the process request with noisy data prior to transmission; and removing the noisy data from the process request when the cumulative profile is returned from the last agent node in the community.