Towards a Time-Dependent Approach for User Privacy Expression and Enforcement

Achieving user privacy is a challenging task in the era of ubiquitous internet and mobile applications where users’ data and activities can be tracked days and nights, by the myriads of applications installed on smartphones, watches, TV, and appliances. The need for a practical, easy to use, and most of all expressive tools to express and enforce privacy rules is still insistent nowadays. Even though the law enforces in many regions of the world the user data protection as a legal principle, still mobile apps and web applications and plugins lack of a steady process that allows users to express, validate and verify their privacy rules when they are interacting with a given application. We introduce in this paper a new approach, which combines both non monotonic logics with the Linear temporal logic (LTL) to define and interpret time-constrained logical predicates used to define data sharing functions based on time such as Periodic Blocking, Time prohibition, and Data shelf life. This paper is a first step towards a time-dependent knowledge base system for privacy rule expression and enforcement.