NLP Privacy Risk Identification in Social Media (NLP-PRISM): A Survey

Dhiman Goswami, Jai Kruthunz Naveen Kumar, Sanchari Das


Abstract
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is integral to social media analytics but often processes content containing Personally Identifiable Information (PII), behavioral cues, and metadata raising privacy risks such as surveillance, profiling, and targeted advertising. To systematically assess these risks, we review 203 peer-reviewed papers and propose the NLP Privacy Risk Identification in Social Media (NLP-PRISM) framework, which evaluates vulnerabilities across six dimensions: data collection, preprocessing, visibility, fairness, computational risk, and regulatory compliance. Our analysis shows that transformer models achieve F1-scores ranging from 0.58–0.84, but incur a 1% - 23% drop under privacy-preserving fine-tuning. Using NLP-PRISM, we examine privacy coverage in six NLP tasks: sentiment analysis (16), emotion detection (14), offensive language identification (19), code-mixed processing (39), native language identification (29), and dialect detection (24) revealing substantial gaps in privacy research. We further found a (↓ 2%-9%) trade-off in model utility, MIA AUC (membership inference attacks) 0.81, AIA accuracy 0.75 (attribute inference attacks). Finally, we advocate for stronger anonymization, privacy-aware learning, and fairness-driven training to enable ethical NLP in social media contexts.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-eacl.78
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026
Month:
March
Year:
2026
Address:
Rabat, Morocco
Editors:
Vera Demberg, Kentaro Inui, Lluís Marquez
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1519–1541
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.findings-eacl.78/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Dhiman Goswami, Jai Kruthunz Naveen Kumar, and Sanchari Das. 2026. NLP Privacy Risk Identification in Social Media (NLP-PRISM): A Survey. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026, pages 1519–1541, Rabat, Morocco. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
NLP Privacy Risk Identification in Social Media (NLP-PRISM): A Survey (Goswami et al., Findings 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.findings-eacl.78.pdf
Checklist:
 2026.findings-eacl.78.checklist.pdf