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Tianshi Li

Publications and source records attributed to Tianshi Li.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

CIDER: A Dataset of Contextual Disclosure Boundaries for Privacy Preference Alignment

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human privacy preferences requires capturing individuals' disclosure boundaries beyond general privacy norms. However, a gap remains in eliciting such nuanced preferences to evaluate alignment in realistic settings. We introduce CIDER, a dataset of 14,850 human annotations from 169 users, forming 1,650 contextual disclosure boundary sets across 60 interpersonal communication scenarios involving information sharing that violates privacy norms. Each boundary represents a real user's disclosure decisions over 9 sharing variants in a scenario, for a given communication role and AI-mediated condition. We formulate a task in which models predict a user's disclosure decision from historical boundaries, with varying levels of contextual information. Across 12 open and proprietary models, in-context personalization improves prediction accuracy by up to 11.41 percentage points using only 6 historical examples. Larger models such as GPT-5.4 (with medium reasoning effort) and Claude Sonnet 4.6 are better at leveraging semantic context to understand user-specific, context-dependent disclosure preferences for more accurate predictions, while smaller models tend to rely on structured heuristics based on disclosure granularity and identifiability. Personalization generally improves prediction accuracy, but the improvement is often accompanied by imbalanced shifts in false-positive and false-negative rates across models, with only Claude Sonnet 4.6 achieving balanced improvements in both. Our findings reveal both the promise and limitations of inference-time personalization for privacy preference modeling and position CIDER as a resource for advancing personalized privacy alignment.

cs.AI

LLM Anonymization Against Agentic Re-Identification

Agentic LLMs with web search change the threat model for text anonymization: weak contextual cues can become cross-referenceable evidence for re-identification, yet those same details also carry downstream analytic value of the text. Existing defenses either remove explicit identifiers, perturb text for formal privacy, or test rewritten text against non-web inference models, leaving underexplored the operating region between resistance to agentic web-search re-identification and utility retention. We introduce AURA (\textbf{A}nonymization with \textbf{U}tility-\textbf{R}etention \textbf{A}daptation), an LLM-powered \textit{mask-reconstruct} framework that decouples privacy localization from utility-preserving reconstruction and selects candidates with adversarial privacy and utility-retention checks. We evaluate AURA on real-user interview transcripts using re-identification attacks carried out by web-search agents, along with a utility evaluation based on interviewee-profile facts, codebook facts, and the joint contextual utility grid. Our results show that AURA improves the privacy-utility frontier by using adaptive privacy scope to strengthen resistance to agentic re-identification and using a mask-reconstruct anonymization method to better preserve contextual utility under fixed privacy scope.

cs.CR

Comparing Human Oversight Strategies for Computer-Use Agents

LLM-powered computer-use agents (CUAs) are shifting users from direct manipulation to supervisory coordination. Existing oversight mechanisms, however, have largely been studied as isolated interface features, making broader oversight strategies difficult to compare. We conceptualize CUA oversight as a structural coordination problem defined by delegation structure and engagement level, and use this lens to compare four oversight strategies in a mixed-methods study with 48 participants in a live web environment. Our results show that oversight strategy more reliably shaped users' exposure to problematic actions than their ability to correct them once visible. Plan-based strategies were associated with lower rates of agent problematic-action occurrence, but not equally strong gains in runtime intervention success once such actions became visible. On subjective measures, no single strategy was uniformly best, and the clearest context-sensitive differences appeared in trust. Qualitative findings further suggest that intervention depended not only on what controls users retained, but on whether risky moments became legible as requiring judgment during execution. These findings suggest that effective CUA oversight is not achieved by maximizing human involvement alone. Instead, it depends on how supervision is structured to surface decision-critical moments and support their recognition in time for meaningful intervention.

cs.HC

From Fragmentation to Integration: Exploring the Design Space of AI Agents for Human-as-the-Unit Privacy Management

Managing one's digital footprint is overwhelming, as it spans multiple platforms and involves countless context-dependent decisions. Recent advances in agentic AI offer ways forward by enabling holistic, contextual privacy-enhancing solutions. Building on this potential, we adopted a ''human-as-the-unit'' perspective and investigated users' cross-context privacy challenges through 12 semi-structured interviews. Results reveal that people rely on ad hoc manual strategies while lacking comprehensive privacy controls, highlighting nine privacy-management challenges across applications, temporal contexts, and relationships. To explore solutions, we generated nine AI agent concepts and evaluated them via a speed-dating survey with 116 US participants. The three highest-ranked concepts were all post-sharing management tools with half or full agent autonomy, with users expressing greater trust in AI accuracy than in their own efforts. Our findings highlight a promising design space where users see AI agents bridging the fragments in privacy management, particularly through automated, comprehensive post-sharing remediation of users' digital footprints.

cs.HC

Disclose with Care: Designing Privacy Controls in Interview Chatbots

Collecting data on sensitive topics remains challenging in HCI, as participants often withhold information due to privacy concerns and social desirability bias. While chatbots' perceived anonymity may reduce these barriers, research paradoxically suggests people tend to over-share personal or sensitive information with chatbots. In this work, we explore privacy controls in chatbot interviews to address this problem. The privacy control allows participants to revise their transcripts at the end of the interview, featuring two design variants: free editing and AI-aided editing. In a between-subjects study \red{($N=188$)}, we compared no-editing, free-editing, and AI-aided editing conditions in a chatbot-based interview on a sensitive topic. Our results confirm the prevalent issue of oversharing in chatbot-based interviews and show that AI-aided editing serves as an effective privacy-control mechanism, reducing PII disclosure while maintaining data quality and user engagement, thereby offering a promising approach to balancing ethical practice and data quality in such interviews.

cs.HC

PriviSense: A Frida-Based Framework for Multi-Sensor Spoofing on Android

Mobile apps increasingly rely on real-time sensor and system data to adapt their behavior to user context. While emulators and instrumented builds offer partial solutions, they often fail to support reproducible testing of context-sensitive app behavior on physical devices. We present PriviSense, a Frida-based, on-device toolkit for runtime spoofing of sensor and system signals on rooted Android devices. PriviSense can script and inject time-varying sensor streams (accelerometer, gyroscope, step counter) and system values (battery level, system time, device metadata) into unmodified apps, enabling reproducible on-device experiments without emulators or app rewrites. Our demo validates real-time spoofing on a rooted Android device across five representative sensor-visualization apps. By supporting scriptable and reversible manipulation of these values, PriviSense facilitates testing of app logic, uncovering of context-based behaviors, and privacy-focused analysis. To ensure ethical use, the code is shared upon request with verified researchers. Tool Guide: How to Run PriviSense on Rooted Android https://bit.ly/privisense-guide Demonstration video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Qwnogcc3pw

cs.SE

Agentic LLMs as Powerful Deanonymizers: Re-identification of Participants in the Anthropic Interviewer Dataset

On December 4, 2025, Anthropic released Anthropic Interviewer, an AI tool for running qualitative interviews at scale, along with a public dataset of 1,250 interviews with professionals, including 125 scientists, about their use of AI for research. Focusing on the scientist subset, I show that widely available LLMs with web search and agentic capabilities can link six out of twenty-four interviews to specific scientific works, recovering associated authors and, in some cases, uniquely identifying the interviewees. My contribution is to show that modern LLM-based agents make such re-identification attacks easy and low-effort: off-the-shelf tools can, with a few natural-language prompts, search the web, cross-reference details, and propose likely matches, effectively lowering the technical barrier. Existing safeguards can be bypassed by breaking down the re-identification into benign tasks. I outline the attack at a high level, discuss implications for releasing rich qualitative data in the age of LLM agents, and propose mitigation recommendations and open problems. I have notified Anthropic of my findings.

cs.CR

Beyond Permissions: Investigating Mobile Personalization with Simulated Personas

Mobile applications increasingly rely on sensor data to infer user context and deliver personalized experiences. Yet the mechanisms behind this personalization remain opaque to users and researchers alike. This paper presents a sandbox system that uses sensor spoofing and persona simulation to audit and visualize how mobile apps respond to inferred behaviors. Rather than treating spoofing as adversarial, we demonstrate its use as a tool for behavioral transparency and user empowerment. Our system injects multi-sensor profiles - generated from structured, lifestyle-based personas - into Android devices in real time, enabling users to observe app responses to contexts such as high activity, location shifts, or time-of-day changes. With automated screenshot capture and GPT-4 Vision-based UI summarization, our pipeline helps document subtle personalization cues. Preliminary findings show measurable app adaptations across fitness, e-commerce, and everyday service apps such as weather and navigation. We offer this toolkit as a foundation for privacy-enhancing technologies and user-facing transparency interventions.

cs.HC

Autonomy Reshapes How Personalization Affects Privacy Concerns and Trust in LLM Agents

LLM agents require personal information for personalization in order to effectively act on users' behalf, but this raises privacy concerns that can discourage data sharing, limiting both the autonomy levels at which agents can operate and the effectiveness of personalization. Yet the expanded design space of agent autonomy also presents opportunities to shape these effects, which remain underexplored. We conducted a $3\times3$ between-subjects experiment ($N=450$) to study how agent autonomy level influences personalization's effects on users' privacy concerns, trust, and willingness to use, as well as the underlying psychological processes. We find that risk-contingent autonomy, where the agent delegates control back to users upon detecting potential privacy leakage, improves users' perceived control. This in turn attenuates personalization's adverse effects: privacy concerns rise less and trust declines less. Our results suggest that designing $\textbf{agent's autonomy}$ that supports $\textbf{human autonomy}$ (both perceived control and oversight effectiveness) helps users benefit from personalization without being deterred by growing privacy concerns. This positions aligning decision authority between users and agents ($\textbf{autonomy alignment}$) as an important opportunity and challenge for trustworthy human-agent interaction.

cs.HC

Operationalizing Data Minimization for Privacy-Preserving LLM Prompting

The rapid deployment of large language models (LLMs) in consumer applications has led to frequent exchanges of personal information. To obtain useful responses, users often share more than necessary, increasing privacy risks via memorization, context-based personalization, or security breaches. We present a framework to formally define and operationalize data minimization: for a given user prompt and response model, quantifying the least privacy-revealing disclosure that maintains utility, and we propose a priority-queue tree search to locate this optimal point within a privacy-ordered transformation space. We evaluated the framework on four datasets spanning open-ended conversations (ShareGPT, WildChat) and knowledge-intensive tasks with single-ground-truth answers (CaseHold, MedQA), quantifying achievable data minimization with nine LLMs as the response model. Our results demonstrate that larger frontier LLMs can tolerate stronger data minimization while maintaining task quality than smaller open-source models (85.7% redaction for GPT-5 vs. 19.3% for Qwen2.5-0.5B). By comparing with our search-derived benchmarks, we find that LLMs struggle to predict optimal data minimization directly, showing a bias toward abstraction that leads to oversharing. This suggests not just a privacy gap, but a capability gap: models may lack awareness of what information they actually need to solve a task.

cs.LG

PrivacyMotiv: Vulnerability-Centered Persona Journeys for Empathic Privacy Reviews in UX Design

UX professionals routinely conduct design reviews, yet privacy concerns are often overlooked, not only due to limited tools, but more fundamentally from low intrinsic motivation, driven by limited privacy knowledge, weak empathy for unexpectedly affected users, and low autonomy in identifying harms. We present PrivacyMotiv, an LLM-powered system that generates vulnerability-centered personas, persona journey stories, and traceable design diagnoses grounded in lo-fi user flows to support privacy-oriented UX design review. In a within-subjects study with professional UX practitioners (N=16), PrivacyMotiv significantly improved empathy, intrinsic motivation, and perceived usefulness, with participants identifying 59% more privacy issues and proposing 70% more redesign solutions compared to self-proposed methods. This work contributes empirical insight into motivational barriers in privacy-aware UX and a structured, narrative-driven approach for integrating privacy review into early-stage UX practice.

cs.CR

Position: Privacy Is Not Just Memorization!

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.

cs.CR

Exploring Collaboration Breakdowns Between Provider Teams and Patients in Post-Surgery Care

Post-surgery care involves ongoing collaboration between provider teams and patients, which starts from post-surgery hospitalization through home recovery after discharge. While prior HCI research has primarily examined patients' challenges at home, less is known about how provider teams coordinate discharge preparation and care handoffs, and how breakdowns in communication and care pathways may affect patient recovery. To investigate this gap, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 13 healthcare providers and 4 patients in the context of gastrointestinal (GI) surgery. We found coordination boundaries between in- and out-patient teams, coupled with complex organizational structures within teams, impeded the "invisible work" of preparing patients' home care plans and triaging patient information. For patients, these breakdowns resulted in inadequate preparation for home transition and fragmented self-collected data, both of which undermine timely clinical decision-making. Based on these findings, we outline design opportunities to formalize task ownership and handoffs, contextualize co-temporal signals, and align care plans with home resources.

cs.HC

Not My Agent, Not My Boundary? Elicitation of Personal Privacy Boundaries in AI-Delegated Information Sharing

Aligning AI systems with human privacy preferences requires understanding individuals' nuanced disclosure behaviors beyond general norms. Yet eliciting such boundaries remains challenging due to the context-dependent nature of privacy decisions and the complex trade-offs involved. We present an AI-powered elicitation approach that probes individuals' privacy boundaries through a discriminative task. We conducted a between-subjects study that systematically varied communication roles and delegation conditions, resulting in 1,681 boundary specifications from 169 participants for 61 scenarios. We examined how these contextual factors and individual differences influence the boundary specification. Quantitative results show that communication roles influence individuals' acceptance of detailed and identifiable disclosure, AI delegation and individuals' need for privacy heighten sensitivity to disclosed identifiers, and AI delegation results in less consensus across individuals. Our findings highlight the importance of situating privacy preference elicitation within real-world data flows. We advocate using nuanced privacy boundaries as an alignment goal for future AI systems.

cs.CR

Dark Patterns Meet GUI Agents: LLM Agent Susceptibility to Manipulative Interfaces and the Role of Human Oversight

The dark patterns, deceptive interface designs manipulating user behaviors, have been extensively studied for their effects on human decision-making and autonomy. Yet, with the rising prominence of LLM-powered GUI agents that automate tasks from high-level intents, understanding how dark patterns affect agents is increasingly important. We present a two-phase empirical study examining how agents, human participants, and human-AI teams respond to 16 types of dark patterns across diverse scenarios. Phase 1 highlights that agents often fail to recognize dark patterns, and even when aware, prioritize task completion over protective action. Phase 2 revealed divergent failure modes: humans succumb due to cognitive shortcuts and habitual compliance, while agents falter from procedural blind spots. Human oversight improved avoidance but introduced costs such as attentional tunneling and cognitive load. Our findings show neither humans nor agents are uniformly resilient, and collaboration introduces new vulnerabilities, suggesting design needs for transparency, adjustable autonomy, and oversight.

cs.HC

From Perception to Protection: A Developer-Centered Study of Security and Privacy Threats in Extended Reality (XR)

The immersive nature of XR introduces a fundamentally different set of security and privacy (S&P) challenges due to the unprecedented user interactions and data collection that traditional paradigms struggle to mitigate. As the primary architects of XR applications, developers play a critical role in addressing novel threats. However, to effectively support developers, we must first understand how they perceive and respond to different threats. Despite the growing importance of this issue, there is a lack of in-depth, threat-aware studies that examine XR S&P from the developers' perspective. To fill this gap, we interviewed 23 professional XR developers with a focus on emerging threats in XR. Our study addresses two research questions aiming to uncover existing problems in XR development and identify actionable paths forward. By examining developers' perceptions of S&P threats, we found that: (1) XR development decisions (e.g., rich sensor data collection, user-generated content interfaces) are closely tied to and can amplify S&P threats, yet developers are often unaware of these risks, resulting in cognitive biases in threat perception; and (2) limitations in existing mitigation methods, combined with insufficient strategic, technical, and communication support, undermine developers' motivation, awareness, and ability to effectively address these threats. Based on these findings, we propose actionable and stakeholder-aware recommendations to improve XR S&P throughout the XR development process. This work represents the first effort to undertake a threat-aware, developer-centered study in the XR domain -- an area where the immersive, data-rich nature of the XR technology introduces distinctive challenges.

cs.CR

Toward a Human-Centered Evaluation Framework for Trustworthy LLM-Powered GUI Agents

The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has revolutionized Graphical User Interface (GUI) automation through LLM-powered GUI agents, yet their ability to process sensitive data with limited human oversight raises significant privacy and security risks. This position paper identifies three key risks of GUI agents and examines how they differ from traditional GUI automation and general autonomous agents. Despite these risks, existing evaluations focus primarily on performance, leaving privacy and security assessments largely unexplored. We review current evaluation metrics for both GUI and general LLM agents and outline five key challenges in integrating human evaluators for GUI agent assessments. To address these gaps, we advocate for a human-centered evaluation framework that incorporates risk assessments, enhances user awareness through in-context consent, and embeds privacy and security considerations into GUI agent design and evaluation.

cs.HC

The Obvious Invisible Threat: LLM-Powered GUI Agents' Vulnerability to Fine-Print Injections

A Large Language Model (LLM) powered GUI agent is a specialized autonomous system that performs tasks on the user's behalf according to high-level instructions. It does so by perceiving and interpreting the graphical user interfaces (GUIs) of relevant apps, often visually, inferring necessary sequences of actions, and then interacting with GUIs by executing the actions such as clicking, typing, and tapping. To complete real-world tasks, such as filling forms or booking services, GUI agents often need to process and act on sensitive user data. However, this autonomy introduces new privacy and security risks. Adversaries can inject malicious content into the GUIs that alters agent behaviors or induces unintended disclosures of private information. These attacks often exploit the discrepancy between visual saliency for agents and human users, or the agent's limited ability to detect violations of contextual integrity in task automation. In this paper, we characterized six types of such attacks, and conducted an experimental study to test these attacks with six state-of-the-art GUI agents, 234 adversarial webpages, and 39 human participants. Our findings suggest that GUI agents are highly vulnerable, particularly to contextually embedded threats. Moreover, human users are also susceptible to many of these attacks, indicating that simple human oversight may not reliably prevent failures. This misalignment highlights the need for privacy-aware agent design. We propose practical defense strategies to inform the development of safer and more reliable GUI agents.

cs.HC