Alignment and Divergence between Humans and AI in Interpersonal Privacy Decisions

Abstract

AI assistants increasingly mediate interpersonal communication on behalf of their primary user, but they risk violating the privacy expectations of third-party information owners. Resolving these tensions requires understanding how humans anticipate interpersonal privacy boundaries. Therefore, we conducted a dyadic study (N=76) and a matched evaluation of AI models across 18 information types and 3 recipient relationships. We found that data owners'privacy judgments are highly contextual and relationship dependent. While familiar data co-owners show meaningful alignment with owners'expectations, they significantly overestimate the need for permission. Interestingly, greater familiarity within the owner-co-owner dyad was associated with both higher disclosure acceptability and lower co-owner misalignment, whereas our exploratory four-item empathy measure was not. In contrast, AI models significantly underperform human co-owners in anticipating the data acceptability, even when provided with within-dyad examples. These findings underscore a core HCI design challenge to develop privacy-aware AI that respects multi-stakeholder information boundaries.