# Say Something Else: Rethinking Contextual Privacy as Information Sufficiency

Source: [Say Something Else: Rethinking Contextual Privacy as Information Sufficiency](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/69d732727d0172140ec76a2d>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2026-04-10T05:00:04.898Z

Authors: Yunze Xiao, Wenkai Li, Xiaoyuan Wu, Ningshan Ma, Yueqi Song, Weihao Xuan

Published: 2026-04-07T19:44:45.000Z

## Abstract

LLM agents increasingly draft messages on behalf of users, yet users routinely overshare sensitive information and disagree on what counts as private. Existing systems support only suppression (omitting sensitive information) and generalization (replacing information with an abstraction), and are typically evaluated on single isolated messages, leaving both the strategy space and evaluation setting incomplete. We formalize privacy-preserving LLM communication as an \\textbf{Information Sufficiency (IS)} task, introduce \\textbf{free-text pseudonymization} as a third strategy that replaces sensitive attributes with functionally equivalent alternatives, and propose a \\textbf{conversational evaluation protocol} that assesses strategies under realistic multi-turn follow-up pressure. Across 792 scenarios spanning three power-relation types (institutional, peer, intimate) and three sensitivity categories (discrimination risk, social cost, boundary), we evaluate seven frontier LLMs on privacy at two granularities, covertness, and utility. Pseudonymization yields the strongest privacy\\textendash utility tradeoff overall, and single-message evaluation systematically underestimates leakage, with generalization losing up to 16.3 percentage points of privacy under follow-up.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

- [Probed Adversary Evaluation on 792 Privacy Evaluation Scenarios final benchmark 1.0](<https://www.sota2.com/research/sota/probed-adversary-evaluation-on-792-privacy-evaluation-scenarios-final-benchmark-1-0.md>): Probed Adversary Evaluation; 792 Privacy Evaluation Scenarios final benchmark 1.0; HLSp Score: not recorded.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.06409>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.06409.pdf>)