# Guarding Your Conversations: Privacy Gatekeepers for Secure Interactions with Cloud-Based AI Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.16765 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16765/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 18 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Mistral 7B](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06825/) (2023)
- [Code Llama: Open Foundation Models for Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12950/) (2023)
- [Zephyr: Direct Distillation of LM Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16944/) (2023)
- [ProPILE: Probing Privacy Leakage in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01881/) (2023)
- [Effective Transfer Learning for Identifying Similar Questions: Matching User Questions to COVID-19 FAQs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.13546/) (2020)
- [Casper: Prompt Sanitization for Protecting User Privacy in Web-Based Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.07004/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [A Survey on Collaborating Small and Large Language Models for Performance, Cost-effectiveness, Cloud-edge Privacy, and Trustworthiness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13890/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The interactive nature of Large Language Models (LLMs), which closely track user data and context, has prompted users to share personal and private information in unprecedented ways. Even when users opt out of allowing their data to be used for training, these privacy settings offer limited protection when LLM providers operate in jurisdictions with weak privacy laws, invasive government surveillance, or poor data security practices. In such cases, the risk of sensitive information, including Personally Identifiable Information (PII), being mishandled or exposed remains high. To address this, we propose the concept of an "LLM gatekeeper", a lightweight, locally run model that filters out sensitive information from user queries before they are sent to the potentially untrustworthy, though highly capable, cloud-based LLM. Through experiments with human subjects, we demonstrate that this dual-model approach introduces minimal overhead while significantly enhancing user privacy, without compromising the quality of LLM responses.