2nd Workshop · HAIPS@COLM 2026

Human-Centered Privacy and Security for Language Models

Studying, critiquing, and building privacy and security protections for language models used by real people.

October 9, 2026 San Francisco Co-located with COLM 2026

Language models are rapidly becoming embedded in the interaction fabric of our society — as assistants, tutors, collaborators, and autonomous agents across domains from healthcare to software engineering to creative work. Their versatility makes them uniquely powerful but also uniquely hard to secure: privacy and security risks arise not just from model internals but from the rich, open-ended ways people interact with and through these systems.

Humans sit at the center of these challenges — as victims of privacy violations and manipulation, as intentional or unintentional facilitators of risk, and as bystanders whose data is swept up without consent.

HAIPS@COLM aims to bring a human-centered, interdisciplinary lens to LM privacy and security, building on the 1st HAIPS Workshop held at ACM CCS 2025. We aim to foster a two-way exchange between the COLM community and researchers in HCI, usable security, and policy — grounding human-centered approaches in what LMs actually do, and informing model design with how people actually experience them.

Key Dates

  1. Submission Deadline
  2. Notification of Acceptance
  3. Camera-Ready Deadline
  4. Workshop

Invited Speakers

Schedule

Friday, October 9, 2026 · San Francisco · All times are Pacific Daylight Time (PDT). Each spotlight is an 8-minute talk followed by 2 minutes of Q&A.

Time Session Details
9:00–9:10 Opening remarks
9:10–9:40 Invited talk Florian Tramèr (ETH Zurich) Remote talk
9:40–10:10 Invited talk Helen Nissenbaum (Cornell Tech)
10:10–10:35 Coffee break + posters
10:35–11:05 Invited talk Ruoxi Jia (Virginia Tech)
11:05–11:35 Invited talk Maarten Sap (Carnegie Mellon University)
11:35–12:05 Invited talk Nina Taft (Google)
12:05–13:25 Lunch
13:25–14:10 Panel discussion Panelists: Helen Nissenbaum, Ruoxi Jia, Maarten Sap, Nina Taft; Moderator: TBD
14:10–14:15 Break
14:15–14:25 Spotlight talk PrivacySIM: Evaluating LLM Simulation of User Privacy Behavior James Flemings, Murali Annavaram
14:25–14:35 Spotlight talk Natively Unlearnable Large Language Models Gaurav Rohit Ghosal, Pratyush Maini, Aditi Raghunathan
14:35–14:45 Spotlight talk Your Agent, Their Asset: A Real-World Safety Analysis of OpenClaw Zijun Wang, Haoqin Tu, Letian Zhang, Hardy Chen, Juncheng Wu, Xiangyan Liu, Zhenlong Yuan, Tianyu Pang, Michael Qizhe Shieh, Fengze Liu, Zeyu Zheng, Huaxiu Yao, Yuyin Zhou, Cihang Xie
14:45–14:55 Spotlight talk Risk vs. Reward: Supporting Practitioners' Understanding of LLM Privacy Risks Aseem Shrey, Weiqian Zhang, Ece Gumusel, Hana Habib
14:55–15:05 Spotlight talk Loose Lips: Understanding Privacy Leakage in Agentic Dialogue Soumya Sharma, Ayana Hussain, Héber Hwang Arcolezi, Ulrich Aïvodji, Spandana Gella, Adriana Romero-Soriano, Golnoosh Farnadi
15:05–15:15 Spotlight talk Act on Your Behalf, Beyond Your Authorization: Benchmarking LLM Agent Authorization Alignment Zhiping Zhang, Zihao Huang, Franklin Mingzhe Li, Tianshi Li
15:15–15:25 Spotlight talk Auditing Prompt Injection Defenses Before They Reach Users: What Strong Adversaries Reveal Xiaoxue Yang, Bozhidar Stevanoski, Matthieu Meeus, Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye
15:25–16:15 Poster session + coffee
16:15–17:15 Unconference discussions
17:15–17:30 Closing remarks

Call for Papers

HAIPS@COLM invites work that studies, critiques, and builds privacy, security, and safety protections for language models and agentic AI systems as technologies used by real people. We welcome submissions from both the core language-modeling community and the HCI, usable security, privacy, and policy communities.

We especially encourage work that connects technical mechanisms with human needs, including systems, tools, infrastructure, empirical studies, benchmarks, design work, policy analysis, audits, and position papers. Human-centered work need not always include a user study; technical papers are welcome when they clearly articulate the people, workflows, communities, or deployment contexts their work is intended to benefit.

Topics of Interest

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Our goal is to bring together researchers who identify emerging risks, understand their human and societal implications, and build practical protections that make language-model systems safer, more private, more secure, and more accountable in real-world use.

Submission Format

Review Process

Review will be double-blind on OpenReview, with at least two reviewers per paper. Conflicts of interest will be managed through OpenReview’s COI detection and self-declared conflicts.

Awards

We aim to establish Best Paper and Best Student Paper awards to highlight outstanding work, with particular attention to early-career researchers.

Submit your paper via OpenReview: https://openreview.net/group?id=colmweb.org/COLM/2026/Workshop/HAIPS

Organizers