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Position: Privacy Is Not Just Memorization!

Published: October 2, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2510.01645v1

By: Niloofar Mireshghallah, Tianshi Li

Potential Business Impact:

Protects your secrets from smart computer programs.

Business Areas:
Natural Language Processing Artificial Intelligence, Data and Analytics, Software

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.

Country of Origin
🇺🇸 United States

Page Count
27 pages

Category
Computer Science:
Cryptography and Security