Pavel Naumov and Jia Tao

The paper proposes a logical framework for reasoning about agents' ability to protect their privacy by hiding certain information from a privacy intruder. It is assumed that the knowledge of the intruder is derived from the observation of pieces of evidence and that there is a cost associated with the elimination of the evidence.
The logical framework contains a modal operator labeled by a group of agents and a total budget available to this group. The key contribution of this work is the proposed incorporation of the cost factor into privacy protection reasoning within the standard modal logic framework. The main technical result are the soundness and completeness theorems for the introduced logical system with respect to a formally defined semantics. [pdf]