Related papers: Subject-level Inference for Realistic Text Anonymi…
Sanitizing sensitive text data typically involves removing personally identifiable information (PII) or generating synthetic data under the assumption that these methods adequately protect privacy; however, their effectiveness is often only…
Text sanitization is the task of redacting a document to mask all occurrences of (direct or indirect) personal identifiers, with the goal of concealing the identity of the individual(s) referred in it. In this paper, we consider a two-step…
The widespread adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) has raised significant privacy concerns regarding the exposure of personally identifiable information (PII) in user prompts. To address this challenge, we propose a query-unrelated PII…
In this work, we aim to clarify and reconcile metrics for evaluating privacy protection in text through a systematic survey. Although text anonymization is essential for enabling NLP research and model development in domains with sensitive…
Qualitative research often contains personal, contextual, and organizational details that pose privacy risks if not handled appropriately. Manual anonymization is time-consuming, inconsistent, and frequently omits critical identifiers.…
Text sanitization aims to rewrite parts of a document to prevent disclosure of personal information. The central challenge of text sanitization is to strike a balance between privacy protection (avoiding the leakage of personal information)…
We present a novel benchmark and associated evaluation metrics for assessing the performance of text anonymization methods. Text anonymization, defined as the task of editing a text document to prevent the disclosure of personal…
Vision Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly integrated into privacy-critical domains, yet existing evaluations of personally identifiable information (PII) leakage largely treat privacy as a static extraction task and ignore how a…
Privacy Impact Assessments (PIAs) offer a systematic process for assessing the privacy impacts of a project or system. As a privacy engineering strategy, PIAs are heralded as one of the main approaches to privacy by design, supporting the…
Privacy Masking is a critical concept under data privacy involving anonymization and de-anonymization of personally identifiable information (PII). Privacy masking techniques rely on Named Entity Recognition (NER) approaches under NLP…
Personally identifiable information (PII) anonymization is a high-stakes task that poses a barrier to many open-science data sharing initiatives. While PII identification has made large strides in recent years, in practice, error thresholds…
In this work, we address the problem of text anonymization where the goal is to prevent adversaries from correctly inferring private attributes of the author, while keeping the text utility, i.e., meaning and semantics. We propose…
Text anonymization is the process of removing or obfuscating information from textual data to protect the privacy of individuals. This process inherently involves a complex trade-off between privacy protection and information preservation,…
Data containing personal information is increasingly used to train, fine-tune, or query Large Language Models (LLMs). Text is typically scrubbed of identifying information prior to use, often with tools such as Microsoft's Presidio or…
Reliable detection of personally identifiable information (PII) is increasingly important across modern data-processing systems, yet the task remains difficult: PII spans are heterogeneous, locale-dependent, context-sensitive, and often…
Recent work in the privacy literature shows that sample-targeted membership inference attacks (MIAs) significantly outperform untargeted approaches by a wide margin. Motivated by this observation, we address the following question: can the…
Protecting Personal Identifiable Information (PII) in text data is crucial for privacy, but current PII generalization methods face challenges such as uneven data distributions and limited context awareness. To address these issues, we…
Detecting personally identifiable information (PII) in user queries is critical for ensuring privacy in question-answering systems. Current approaches mainly redact all PII, disregarding the fact that some of them may be contextually…
Recent privacy research on large language models (LLMs) has shown that they achieve near-human-level performance at inferring personal data from online texts. With ever-increasing model capabilities, existing text anonymization methods are…
Recent studies have shown that large language models (LLMs) can infer private user attributes (e.g., age, location, gender) from user-generated text shared online, enabling rapid and large-scale privacy breaches. Existing…