With the rapid deployment of smart meters in modern smart grid systems, the fine-grained electricity usage data collected at frequent intervals raises significant privacy concerns. Such data may reveal sensitive information about users’ behavior and lifestyle. Therefore, ensuring strong privacy protection is essential in the design of smart metering systems. Although many existing schemes address data privacy and authentication, they often rely on methods vulnerable to quantum attacks or impose substantial computational overhead. To address these challenges, we propose a novel privacy-preserving data collection scheme based on a code-based linkable ring signature. We further evaluate the security and performance of the proposed scheme. The scheme ensures strong identity anonymity, message authentication and traceability of faulty meters even in the presence of quantum adversaries. Experimental results demonstrate that our scheme not only ensures strong privacy but also maintains low computational overhead. This makes it particularly suitable for deployment in resource-constrained smart meter systems, where efficiency and security must be balanced.