Profiling for Pennies: Unveiling the Privacy Iceberg of LLM Agents

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06232v1
• Date: Thu, 07 May 2026 13:21:44 GMT
• Title: Profiling for Pennies: Unveiling the Privacy Iceberg of LLM Agents
• Abstract summary: We investigate privacy perception in the real world through the lens of human awareness.<n>We propose the PrivacyIceberg, which categorizes real-world human privacy risks into three tiers.
• Score: 52.02752011119451
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized how information are collected, aggregated, and reasoned. However, this enables a novel and accessible vector of privacy intrusion: the automated and in-depth personal profiling; this engenders a chilling effect of "peepers everywhere". Existing research primarily unfolds from the training pipeline of LLM, emphasizing the exposure of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) through memorization, while privacy studies from a human-centric perspective remain underexplored. To fill this void, we empirically investigate privacy perception in the real world through the lens of human awareness and the practices of LLM-integrated platforms, revealing a significant dissonance: platforms fail to technically or policy-wise address public privacy concerns. To facilitate a systematic and quantifiable study of privacy risk, we propose the PrivacyIceberg, which categorizes real-world human privacy risks into three tiers: explicitly searched, contextually inferred, and deeply aggregated, based on the sophistication of LLM exploitation. We developed IcebergExplorer to audit privacy exposure, utilizing minimal PII as a search seed to reconstruct high-fidelity profiles, achieving over 90% factual accuracy within 10 minutes at a cost under $3, for real-world scenarios. Additionally, we identify six root causes contributing to such privacy disclosures and propose multi-stakeholder countermeasures for LLM vendors, individuals, and data publishers.

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