QuasiLeak-Bench: Evaluating LLM-Based Privacy Detectors on Policy-Conditioned Quasi-Evidence Group Recovery

Abstract

Natural language messages often contain quasi-identifiers that are weak in isolation but can jointly reveal an individual's private attributes. We call such a jointly revealing set of cues a quasi-evidence group. Existing privacy benchmarks focus on explicit identifiers, attribute inference, or task-driven disclosures, leaving inference from quasi-evidence groups largely unmeasured. In practice, whether exposing such a quasi-evidence group violates privacy also depends on sender-specified disclosure policies. We introduce QuasiLeak-Bench, a benchmark for policy-conditioned quasi-evidence group recovery, which evaluates whether detectors recover complete quasi-evidence groups and flag the disclosures the given policy prohibits. To obtain reliable ground truth at scale, a reverse-construction pipeline first selects weak quasi-identifiers, composes them into quasi-evidence groups verified to jointly reveal a target attribute, and generates documents around this evidence, followed by automated quality control. Experiments show that existing privacy detectors transfer poorly to QuasiLeak-Bench, and locally deployable LLM-based detectors fall far behind proprietary models, mainly because they miss most quasi-evidence groups altogether. However, a 4B model fine-tuned on our training split surpasses the strongest prompted model on held-out documents, showing that the task is learnable.

Research area