Papers for

privacy-savvy software developers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Prompt anonymity often fails to hide user identity from large language model providers

Can Prompt Anonymity Protect Your Identity From LLM Providers?

Abstract: User conversations with large language models (LLMs) often contain highly sensitive personal information that can be exploited by LLM providers to create detailed user dossiers, enable targeted advertising, and train more powerful models. To protect user privacy, anonymizing LLM proxies have emerged as a practical solution that separates user identity from their prompts, yet this approach still leaves the prompt content visible to LLM providers. We study the impact of this gap by conducting the first empirical investigation into the risk of prompt authorship re-identification. Towards this end, we create PromptAnonBench, a novel benchmark for evaluating prompt anonymity, consisting of over 175,000 cleaned, authentic multi-turn user prompts from various real-world datasets (SWE-Chat and WildChat). Using the embeddings of historical user conversations, an attacker can correctly detect and re-identify at least one anonymized conversation for 50--75% of SWE-Chat users and up to 10% of WildChat users at a 10% false acceptance rate for out-of-set users, even with text-based defenses applied. Our findings unveil the risk of relying only on anonymity for private LLM inference and the gap in existing text privacy defenses.

Sun 27 SeptCryptography and Security
The gist
People share very private information when chatting with large language models, and companies behind these models can sometimes figure out who they are based on what they say. The authors collected many real conversations from users and tested whether just hiding usernames is enough to keep them anonymous. They found that attackers can often guess the real person behind an anonymous conversation just by analyzing the text, even when some privacy protections are used. This shows that simply removing names doesn’t fully protect users’ privacy in these chats.
Open → 2609.33903v1