Wei Xu

Luyi Sun, Wei Xu, Zaifeng Gao

As the paradigm of Human-Centered AI (HCAI) gains prominence, its benefits to society are accompanied by significant ethical concerns, one of which is the protection of individual privacy. This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of privacy within HCAI, proposing a human-centered privacy (HCP) framework, providing integrated solution from technology, ethics, and human factors perspectives. The chapter begins by mapping privacy risks across each stage of AI development lifecycle, from data collection to deployment and reuse, highlighting the impact of privacy risks on the entire system. The chapter then introduces privacy-preserving techniques such as federated learning and dif erential privacy. Subsequent chapters integrate the crucial user perspective by examining mental models, alongside the evolving regulatory and ethical landscapes as well as privacy governance. Next, advice on design guidelines is provided based on the human-centered privacy framework. After that, we introduce practical case studies across diverse fields. Finally, the chapter discusses persistent open challenges and future research directions, concluding that a multidisciplinary approach, merging technical, design, policy, and ethical expertise, is essential to successfully embed privacy into the core of HCAI, thereby ensuring these technologies advance in a manner that respects and ensures human autonomy, trust and dignity.

Ruixin Yang, Ethan Mendes, Arthur Wang et al.

Vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong performance in image geolocation, a capability further sharpened by frontier multimodal large reasoning models (MLRMs). This poses a significant privacy risk, as these widely accessible models can be exploited to infer sensitive locations from casually shared photos, often at street-level precision, potentially surpassing the level of detail the sharer consented or intended to disclose. While recent work has proposed applying a blanket restriction on geolocation disclosure to combat this risk, these measures fail to distinguish valid geolocation uses from malicious behavior. Instead, VLMs should maintain contextual integrity by reasoning about elements within an image to determine the appropriate level of information disclosure, balancing privacy and utility. To evaluate how well models respect contextual integrity, we introduce VLM-GEOPRIVACY, a benchmark that challenges VLMs to interpret latent social norms and contextual cues in real-world images and determine the appropriate level of location disclosure. Our evaluation of 14 leading VLMs shows that, despite their ability to precisely geolocate images, the models are poorly aligned with human privacy expectations. They often over-disclose in sensitive contexts and are vulnerable to prompt-based attacks. Our results call for new design principles in multimodal systems to incorporate context-conditioned privacy reasoning.