# A Longitudinal Measurement of Privacy Policy Evolution for Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.21758 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21758/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Agent threats, guardrails and governance, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 48 of its 128 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Nov 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Agent threats, guardrails and governance](https://mlsanity.com/agents/agent-threats-guardrails-and-governance/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12948/) (2025)
- [Chatbot Arena: An Open Platform for Evaluating LLMs by Human Preference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04132/) (2024)
- [Membership Inference Attacks From First Principles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03570/) (2021)
- [GPTFUZZER: Red Teaming Large Language Models with Auto-Generated Jailbreak Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10253/) (2023)
- [Are Large Pre-Trained Language Models Leaking Your Personal Information?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12628/) (2022)
- [Quantifying Privacy Risks of Masked Language Models Using Membership Inference Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03929/) (2022)
- [From ChatGPT to ThreatGPT: Impact of Generative AI in Cybersecurity and Privacy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00691/) (2023)
- [The Emerged Security and Privacy of LLM Agent: A Survey with Case Studies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19354/) (2024)
- [Multi-IF: Benchmarking LLMs on Multi-Turn and Multilingual Instructions Following](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15553/) (2024)
- [Unveiling Privacy Risks in LLM Agent Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13172/) (2025)
- [AIR-Bench 2024: A Safety Benchmark Based on Risk Categories from Regulations and Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.17436/) (2024)
- [Navigating the Risks: A Survey of Security, Privacy, and Ethics Threats in LLM-Based Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.09523/) (2024)
- [Privacy Issues in Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06717/) (2023)
- [Did the Neurons Read your Book? Document-level Membership Inference for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15007/) (2023)
- [Unveiling Security, Privacy, and Ethical Concerns of ChatGPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14192/) (2023)
- [LLM Platform Security: Applying a Systematic Evaluation Framework to OpenAI's ChatGPT Plugins](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10254/) (2023)
- [Privacy in Large Language Models: Attacks, Defenses and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10383/) (2023)
- [Polisis: Automated Analysis and Presentation of Privacy Policies Using Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02561/) (2018)
- [MCP-RADAR: A Multi-Dimensional Benchmark for Evaluating Tool Use Capabilities in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16700/) (2025)
- [The Philosopher's Stone: Trojaning Plugins of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00374/) (2023)
- [PolicyQA: A Reading Comprehension Dataset for Privacy Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02557/) (2020)
- [CLEAR: Towards Contextual LLM-Empowered Privacy Policy Analysis and Risk Generation for Large Language Model Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13387/) (2024)
- [Membership Inference Attacks Against Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.18624/) (2025)
- [Privacy Policies over Time: Curation and Analysis of a Million-Document Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09159/) (2020)
- [Privacy at Scale: Introducing the PrivaSeer Corpus of Web Privacy Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11131/) (2020)
- [The Privacy Policy Landscape After the GDPR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.08396/) (2018)
- [We Value Your Privacy ... Now Take Some Cookies: Measuring the GDPR's Impact on Web Privacy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.05096/) (2018)
- [An In-Depth Investigation of Data Collection in LLM App Ecosystems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13247/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [SkillGuard: A Permission-Centric Framework for Agent Skill Security](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.03024/) (2026)
- [SoK: From Generation to Consumption of Privacy Documents in Software Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.12511/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language model (LLM) services have been rapidly integrated into people's daily lives as chatbots and agentic systems. They are nourished by collecting rich streams of data, raising privacy concerns around excessive collection of sensitive personal information. Privacy policies are the fundamental mechanism for informing users about data practices in modern information privacy paradigm. Although traditional web and mobile policies are well studied, the privacy policies of LLM providers, their LLM-specific content, and their evolution over time remain largely underexplored. In this paper, we present the first longitudinal empirical study of privacy policies for mainstream LLM providers worldwide. We curate a chronological dataset of 74 historical privacy policies and 115 supplemental privacy documents from 11 LLM providers across 5 countries up to August 2025, and extract over 3,000 sentence-level edits between consecutive policy versions. We compare LLM privacy policies to those of other software formats, propose a taxonomy tailored to LLM privacy policies, annotate policy edits and align them with a timeline of key LLM ecosystem events. Results show they are substantially longer, demand college-level reading ability, and remain highly vague. Our taxonomy analysis reveals patterns in how providers disclose LLM-specific practices and highlights regional disparities in coverage. Policy edits are concentrated in first-party data collection and international/specific-audience sections, and that product releases and regulatory actions are the primary drivers, shedding light on the status quo and the evolution of LLM privacy policies.