Privacy Policies with Modal Logic: The Dynamic Turn

Privacy policies are often defined in terms of permitted messages. Instead, in this paper we derive dynamically the permitted messages from static privacy policies defined in terms of permitted and obligatory knowledge. With this new approach, we do not have to specify the permissions and prohibitions of all message combinations explicitly. To specify and reason about such privacy policies, we extend a multi-modal logic introduced by Cuppens and Demolombe with update operators modeling the dynamics of both knowledge and privacy policies. We show also how to determine the obligatory messages, how to express epistemic norms, and how to check whether a situation is compliant with respect to a privacy policy.We axiomatize and prove the decidability of our logic.