How Models Leak Data — The Attacks That Make Privacy Necessary
A trained model feels like a safe abstraction — it's just numbers, a learned function, surely it reveals nothing about the specific data it saw. That intuition is wrong, and a family of attacks proves it: models memorize their training data and can be made to give it up. Understanding these attacks is what turns privacy from a vague worry into a concrete threat you can defend against — and it's why the formal techniques in the rest of the series exist.
A trained model feels safe — it's just numbers — but models memorize their training data and can be made to give it up. Membership inference, model inversion, training-data extraction, and model stealing — many working with only black-box API access, which is why a model trained on sensitive data is itself sensitive data.