Text-Based Personas for Simulating User Privacy Decisions

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.19791v1
• Date: Fri, 20 Mar 2026 09:28:15 GMT
• Title: Text-Based Personas for Simulating User Privacy Decisions
• Abstract summary: We present Narriva, an approach that generates text-based synthetic privacy personas.<n>We analyze the characteristics of Narriva's synthetic personas in modeling both individual and population-level privacy preferences.
• Score: 23.902474542548944
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: The ability to simulate human privacy decisions has significant implications for aligning autonomous agents with individual intent and conducting cost-effective, large-scale privacy-centric user studies. Prior approaches prompt Large Language Models (LLMs) with natural language user statements, data-sharing histories, or demographic attributes to simulate privacy decisions. These approaches, however, fail to balance individual-level accuracy, prompt usability, token efficiency, and population-level representation. We present Narriva, an approach that generates text-based synthetic privacy personas to address these shortcomings. Narriva grounds persona generation in prior user privacy decisions, such as those from large-scale survey datasets, rather than purely relying on demographic stereotypes. It compresses this data into concise, human-readable summaries structured by established privacy theories. Through benchmarking across five diverse datasets, we analyze the characteristics of Narriva's synthetic personas in modeling both individual and population-level privacy preferences. We find that grounding personas in past privacy behaviors achieves up to 88% predictive accuracy (significantly outperforming a non-personalized LLM baseline), and yields an 80-95% reduction in prompt tokens compared to in-context learning with raw examples. Finally, we demonstrate that personas synthesized from a single survey can reproduce the aggregate privacy behaviors and statistical distributions (TVComplement up to 0.85) of entirely different studies.

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