A Case Study on the Impact of Anonymization Along the RAG Pipeline

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 17 Apr 2026] A Case Study on the Impact of Anonymization Along the RAG Pipeline Andreea-Elena Bodea, Stephen Meisenbacher, Florian Matthes Despite the considerable promise of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), many real-world use cases may create privacy concerns, where the purported utility of RAG-enabled insights comes at the risk of exposing private information to either the LLM or the end user requesting the response. As a potential mitigation, using anonymization techniques to remove personally identifiable information (PII) and other sensitive markers in the underlying data represents a practical and sensible course of action for RAG administrators. Despite a wealth of literature on the topic, no works consider the placement of anonymization along the RAG pipeline, i.e., asking the question, where should anonymization happen? In this case study, we systematically and empirically measure the impact of anonymization at two important points along the RAG pipeline: the dataset and generated answer. We show that differences in privacy-utility trade-offs can be observed depending on where anonymization took place, demonstrating the significance of privacy risk mitigation placement in RAG. Comments: 7 pages, 1 figure, 6 tables. Accepted to IWSPA 2026 Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Computation and Language (cs.CL) Cite as: arXiv:2604.15958 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2604.15958v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.15958 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Stephen Meisenbacher [view email] [v1] Fri, 17 Apr 2026 11:23:59 UTC (559 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: cs cs.CL References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)