An multi-level privacy evaluation technology is described for increasing the performance of applications or services that experience high volumes of queries for data with privacy attributes. The multi-level privacy evaluation technology evaluates data using a subset of privacy policy rules and privacy information determined for the data at a backend server and thereby reduces the volume of data that need to be filtered at a frontend server. The multi-level privacy evaluation technology first applies an initial privacy check on a large data set at the backend to authoritatively filter out any data that a viewing user is not permitted to view or access and return as results a smaller data set that the viewing user may be permitted to view or access. A full privacy check is then performed at the frontend on the smaller data set, resulting in reduction in the overall cost of performing privacy checks and reducing latency in displaying data to the viewing user.