Position: Privacy Is Not Just Memorization!

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Mireshghallah, Niloofar, Li, Tianshi
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Mireshghallah, Niloofar
Li, Tianshi
author_facet Mireshghallah, Niloofar
Li, Tianshi
contents The discourse on privacy risks in Large Language Models (LLMs) has disproportionately focused on verbatim memorization of training data, while a constellation of more immediate and scalable privacy threats remain underexplored. This position paper argues that the privacy landscape of LLM systems extends far beyond training data extraction, encompassing risks from data collection practices, inference-time context leakage, autonomous agent capabilities, and the democratization of surveillance through deep inference attacks. We present a comprehensive taxonomy of privacy risks across the LLM lifecycle -- from data collection through deployment -- and demonstrate through case studies how current privacy frameworks fail to address these multifaceted threats. Through a longitudinal analysis of 1,322 AI/ML privacy papers published at leading conferences over the past decade (2016--2025), we reveal that while memorization receives outsized attention in technical research, the most pressing privacy harms lie elsewhere, where current technical approaches offer little traction and viable paths forward remain unclear. We call for a fundamental shift in how the research community approaches LLM privacy, moving beyond the narrow focus of current technical solutions and embracing interdisciplinary approaches that address the sociotechnical nature of these emerging threats.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_01645
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Position: Privacy Is Not Just Memorization!
Mireshghallah, Niloofar
Li, Tianshi
Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
The discourse on privacy risks in Large Language Models (LLMs) has disproportionately focused on verbatim memorization of training data, while a constellation of more immediate and scalable privacy threats remain underexplored. This position paper argues that the privacy landscape of LLM systems extends far beyond training data extraction, encompassing risks from data collection practices, inference-time context leakage, autonomous agent capabilities, and the democratization of surveillance through deep inference attacks. We present a comprehensive taxonomy of privacy risks across the LLM lifecycle -- from data collection through deployment -- and demonstrate through case studies how current privacy frameworks fail to address these multifaceted threats. Through a longitudinal analysis of 1,322 AI/ML privacy papers published at leading conferences over the past decade (2016--2025), we reveal that while memorization receives outsized attention in technical research, the most pressing privacy harms lie elsewhere, where current technical approaches offer little traction and viable paths forward remain unclear. We call for a fundamental shift in how the research community approaches LLM privacy, moving beyond the narrow focus of current technical solutions and embracing interdisciplinary approaches that address the sociotechnical nature of these emerging threats.
title Position: Privacy Is Not Just Memorization!
topic Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01645