🤖 AI Summary
Advances in speech technology exacerbate implicit leakage risks of sensitive attributes—including health, emotion, and identity—enabling severe privacy threats such as price discrimination and stalking. To address this, we propose a multi-dimensional speech privacy threat model and introduce, for the first time, a systematic pedagogical framework that explicitly incorporates side-information leakage pathways. Our methodology integrates privacy-enhancing technologies—including differential privacy, speech perturbation, and federated learning—augmented by information-theoretic metrics, human-subject experiments, and regulatory compliance analysis to establish a unified threat taxonomy and standardized evaluation benchmark. Key technical contributions include: (1) controllable anonymization enabling low-distortion voice de-identification; (2) verifiable privacy guarantees via formal privacy accounting; and (3) user-perception-aware collaborative governance supporting cross-domain privacy management. The framework advances both theoretical rigor and practical deployability in speech privacy protection.
📝 Abstract
Speech technology for communication, accessing information and services has rapidly improved in quality. It is convenient and appealing because speech is the primary mode of communication for humans. Such technology however also presents proven threats to privacy. Speech is a tool for communication and it will thus inherently contain private information. Importantly, it however also contains a wealth of side information, such as information related to health, emotions, affiliations, and relationships, all of which are private. Exposing such private information can lead to serious threats such as price gouging, harassment, extortion, and stalking. This paper is a tutorial on privacy issues related to speech technology, modeling their threats, approaches for protecting users' privacy, measuring the performance of privacy-protecting methods, perception of privacy as well as societal and legal consequences. In addition to a tutorial overview, it also presents lines for further development where improvements are most urgently needed.
