SPILLage: Agentic Oversharing on the Web
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Web, search, and research agents
Abstract (arXiv)
LLM-powered agents are beginning to automate user's tasks across the open web, often with access to user resources such as emails and calendars. Unlike standard LLMs answering questions in a controlled ChatBot setting, web agents act "in the wild", interacting with third parties and leaving behind an action trace. Therefore, we ask the question: how do web agents handle user resources when accomplishing tasks on their behalf across live websites? In this paper, we formalize Natural Agentic Oversharing -- the unintentional disclosure of task-irrelevant user information through an agent trace of actions on the web. We introduce SPILLage, a framework that characterizes oversharing along two dimensions: channel (content vs. behavior) and directness (explicit vs. implicit). This taxonomy reveals a critical blind spot: while prior work focuses on text leakage, web agents also overshare behaviorally through clicks, scrolls, and navigation patterns that can be monitored. We benchmark 180 tasks on live e-commerce sites with ground-truth annotations separating task-relevant from task-irrelevant attributes. Across 1,080 runs spanning two agentic frameworks and three backbone LLMs, we demonstrate that oversharing is pervasive with behavioral oversharing dominates content oversharing by 5x. This effect persists -- and can even worsen -- under prompt-level mitigation. However, removing task-irrelevant information before execution improves task success by up to 17.9%, demonstrating that reducing oversharing improves task success. Our findings underscore that protecting privacy in web agents is a fundamental challenge, requiring a broader view of "output" that accounts for what agents do on the web, not just what they type. Our datasets and code are available at https://github.com/jrohsc/SPILLage.
Key facts. Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Web, search, and research agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 11 of its 26 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 13 Feb 2026.
Builds on
11 of 26 references.
Closest ancestors · 3
Same direction, newest first
- 2025Agentic Web: Weaving the Next Web with AI Agents28 Jul
- 2023WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agents25 Jul
- 2023Mind2Web: Towards a Generalist Agent for the Web9 Jun
Other references · 8
- 2025AI Agents vs. Agentic AI: A Conceptual Taxonomy, Applications and Challengescited by 167
- 2024PrivacyLens: Evaluating Privacy Norm Awareness of Language Models in Actioncited by 161
- 2025WASP: Benchmarking Web Agent Security Against Prompt Injection Attackscited by 140
- 2025Magma: A Foundation Model for Multimodal AI Agentscited by 138
- 2025AgentDAM: Privacy Leakage Evaluation for Autonomous Web Agentscited by 79
- 2025Leaky Thoughts: Large Reasoning Models Are Not Private Thinkerscited by 25
- 2025DECEPTICON: How Dark Patterns Manipulate Web Agentscited by 13
- 2025Network-Level Prompt and Trait Leakage in Local Research Agentscited by 5
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 3.
3 papers.
- 2026PrivacyAlign: Contextual Privacy Alignment for LLM Agentscited by 2
- 2026MosaicLeaks:Privacy Risks in Querying-in-the-Open for Deep Research Agentscited by 0
- 2026Confuse the Model, Control the Flow: Understanding and Mitigating Privacy Leakage from LLM Agents with Information Flow Controlcited by 0
- 2026Confuse the Model, Control the Flow: Understanding and Mitigating Privacy Leakage from LLM Agents with Information Flow Control12 Sep 2026
- 2026PrivacyAlign: Contextual Privacy Alignment for LLM Agents19 Jun 2026
- 2026MosaicLeaks:Privacy Risks in Querying-in-the-Open for Deep Research Agents29 May 2026
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
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- 2025BrowserArena: Evaluating LLM Agents on Real-World Web Navigation Tasks
- 2026Odysseys: Benchmarking Web Agents on Realistic Long Horizon Tasks
- 2026Modeling Distinct Human Interaction in Web Agents
- 2026The Behavioral Fabric of LLM-Powered GUI Agents: Human Values and Interaction Outcomes
- 2024Unveiling Disparities in Web Task Handling Between Human and Web Agent
- 2025REAL: Benchmarking Autonomous Agents on Deterministic Simulations of Real Websites
- 2026Known By Their Actions: Fingerprinting LLM Browser Agents via UI Traces