LLM-as-a-Judge for Privacy Evaluation? Exploring the Alignment of Human and LLM Perceptions of Privacy in Textual Data

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Hauptverfasser: Meisenbacher, Stephen, Klymenko, Alexandra, Matthes, Florian
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Meisenbacher, Stephen
Klymenko, Alexandra
Matthes, Florian
author_facet Meisenbacher, Stephen
Klymenko, Alexandra
Matthes, Florian
contents Despite advances in the field of privacy-preserving Natural Language Processing (NLP), a significant challenge remains the accurate evaluation of privacy. As a potential solution, using LLMs as a privacy evaluator presents a promising approach $\unicode{x2013}$ a strategy inspired by its success in other subfields of NLP. In particular, the so-called $\textit{LLM-as-a-Judge}$ paradigm has achieved impressive results on a variety of natural language evaluation tasks, demonstrating high agreement rates with human annotators. Recognizing that privacy is both subjective and difficult to define, we investigate whether LLM-as-a-Judge can also be leveraged to evaluate the privacy sensitivity of textual data. Furthermore, we measure how closely LLM evaluations align with human perceptions of privacy in text. Resulting from a study involving 10 datasets, 13 LLMs, and 677 human survey participants, we confirm that privacy is indeed a difficult concept to measure empirically, exhibited by generally low inter-human agreement rates. Nevertheless, we find that LLMs can accurately model a global human privacy perspective, and through an analysis of human and LLM reasoning patterns, we discuss the merits and limitations of LLM-as-a-Judge for privacy evaluation in textual data. Our findings pave the way for exploring the feasibility of LLMs as privacy evaluators, addressing a core challenge in solving pressing privacy issues with innovative technical solutions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_12158
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LLM-as-a-Judge for Privacy Evaluation? Exploring the Alignment of Human and LLM Perceptions of Privacy in Textual Data
Meisenbacher, Stephen
Klymenko, Alexandra
Matthes, Florian
Computation and Language
Despite advances in the field of privacy-preserving Natural Language Processing (NLP), a significant challenge remains the accurate evaluation of privacy. As a potential solution, using LLMs as a privacy evaluator presents a promising approach $\unicode{x2013}$ a strategy inspired by its success in other subfields of NLP. In particular, the so-called $\textit{LLM-as-a-Judge}$ paradigm has achieved impressive results on a variety of natural language evaluation tasks, demonstrating high agreement rates with human annotators. Recognizing that privacy is both subjective and difficult to define, we investigate whether LLM-as-a-Judge can also be leveraged to evaluate the privacy sensitivity of textual data. Furthermore, we measure how closely LLM evaluations align with human perceptions of privacy in text. Resulting from a study involving 10 datasets, 13 LLMs, and 677 human survey participants, we confirm that privacy is indeed a difficult concept to measure empirically, exhibited by generally low inter-human agreement rates. Nevertheless, we find that LLMs can accurately model a global human privacy perspective, and through an analysis of human and LLM reasoning patterns, we discuss the merits and limitations of LLM-as-a-Judge for privacy evaluation in textual data. Our findings pave the way for exploring the feasibility of LLMs as privacy evaluators, addressing a core challenge in solving pressing privacy issues with innovative technical solutions.
title LLM-as-a-Judge for Privacy Evaluation? Exploring the Alignment of Human and LLM Perceptions of Privacy in Textual Data
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12158