{"id":254040,"date":"2026-04-07T03:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-04-07T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/04\/07\/new-privacy-tool-helps-detect-when-ai-agents-become-double-agents\/"},"modified":"2026-05-24T08:25:52","modified_gmt":"2026-05-24T12:25:52","slug":"new-privacy-tool-helps-detect-when-ai-agents-become-double-agents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/04\/07\/new-privacy-tool-helps-detect-when-ai-agents-become-double-agents\/","title":{"rendered":"New privacy tool helps detect when AI agents become double agents"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.rit.edu\/news\/new-privacy-tool-helps-detect-when-ai-agents-become-double-agents\">New privacy tool helps detect when AI agents become double agents<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.rit.edu\/news\/new-privacy-tool-helps-detect-when-ai-agents-become-double-agents\">https:\/\/www.rit.edu\/news\/new-privacy-tool-helps-detect-when-ai-agents-become-double-agents<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Publish Date: <a href=\"publish_date]\">2026-04-07 03:00:00<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Source Domain: <a href=\"www.rit.edu\">www.rit.edu<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Artificial intelligence (AI) agents are powerful tools that can make work and life easier. They can also introduce new privacy risks when given access to people\u2019s Social Security numbers.<\/p>\n<p>Privacy experts at Rochester Institute of Technology are studying what happens to personal data when an AI agent starts doing tasks. In the end, RIT researchers aim to make AI agents more accountable.<\/p>\n<p>Yidan Hu, assistant professor of cybersecurity, and Ye Zheng, a computing and information sciences Ph.D. student, developed AudAgent, a tool that continuously monitors the data practices of AI agents. The tool then determines if AI is complying with its stated privacy policies and looks for ways to improve privacy control.<\/p>\n<p>The research comes as agentic AI is gaining traction and can be used in conjunction with generative AI systems like ChatGPT. Unlike a traditional chatbot, an AI agent can take actions on a user\u2019s behalf and use third-party services to complete tasks autonomously, including searching the web, sending emails, booking tickets, and organizing files.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhen I first used ChatGPT I thought it was useful, but I also started to worry about how it might collect my data,\u201d said Hu. \u201cThen, when agentic AI was proposed, this made me very, very worried about data protection.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Hu added, \u201cOur goal is to protect people\u2019s data, while still allowing us to enjoy these emerging systems and AI agents that can be really convenient in our daily lives.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The RIT research was published in the paper, \u201cAudAgent: Automated Auditing of Privacy Policy Compliance in AI Agents.\u201d This work has been accepted at the 2026 Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium.<\/p>\n<h5><strong>How AI agents handle sensitive data<\/strong><\/h5>\n<p>The researchers tested AI agents built with mainstream frameworks and examined how they handled highly sensitive information, including Social Security numbers. What the researchers found surprised them.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe thought there would be stronger protections around&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.rit.edu\/news\/new-privacy-tool-helps-detect-when-ai-agents-become-double-agents\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>New privacy tool helps detect when AI agents become double agents https:\/\/www.rit.edu\/news\/new-privacy-tool-helps-detect-when-ai-agents-become-double-agents Publish Date: 2026-04-07&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":254041,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.rit.edu\/sites\/rit.edu\/files\/styles\/full\/https\/cdn.rit.edu\/images\/news\/2026-04\/WEB-YidanHu_YeZheng.jpg?itok=97kZxLo0","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-254040","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-privacy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254040"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=254040"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254040\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":254042,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254040\/revisions\/254042"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/254041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=254040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=254040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=254040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}