Decoder. plain-English AI glossary

Privacy

● Core

The right to keep your data and identity away from prying eyes—including the AI building on it.

Think of it like

Like the difference between a journal you write and one you share with the world.

Example

A model trained on hospital patient data should never memorize and leak someone's medical history in its outputs.

How it actually works

Privacy in AI has two angles: protecting user data during training (not memorizing specific records) and protecting user inputs from being logged or sold. Models can leak training data, especially if trained on small or sensitive datasets. Privacy-preserving techniques like differential privacy add noise so no single person's data can be fully recovered, but you trade accuracy for safety.

For product teams

Build trust by guaranteeing users their data won't be memorized or resold.

For engineers

Use differential privacy, federated learning, or secure aggregation to prevent data leakage during training and inference.

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