THE EUROPEAN Union is aiming to overhaul its data protection legislation to give people the “right to be forgotten” on the internet.
The new legislation is aimed at protecting the personal data of consumers who post information or photos of themselves on social networks and will help them to “digitally disappear” at a later date if they are so inclined.
Viviane Reding, the European commissioner in charge of justice issues, is pushing for legislative change because of privacy concerns about such companies as Facebook, Google and Microsoft and how they use information about users’ personal habits.
Facebook has more than 500 million users and is valued at $50 billion (€37.4 billion). It recently surpassed Google as the most visited website in the US, receiving 8.9 per cent of all US web visits between January and November 2010.
Ms Reding has described the default privacy settings of the world’s largest social network as inadequate because it automatically makes a significant amount of a user’s personal information widely available and because it is difficult to erase permanently a Facebook account once it is set up.
Launching a drive to toughen up EU data protection this week, Ms Reding said “people shall have the right to withdraw their consent to data processing” and have the right to be forgotten online.
The changes will allow users to take legal action against social networking sites if they believe their privacy has been compromised.
The European Commission believes the new privacy rules could come into force as early this summer and will update 16-year-old data-protection laws. The new rules would force all companies to provide more information on what data they have collected from people, and why.
“Any company operating in the EU market or any online product that is targeted at EU consumers must comply with EU rules,” Ms Reding said.
“To enforce EU law, national privacy watchdogs will be endowed with powers to investigate and engage in legal proceedings against non-EU data controllers,” she added.
She also wants EU-based privacy watchdogs to be given powers to enforce compliance outside Europe, a move that would see them gaining access to servers in the US and elsewhere, something that is unlikely to please US businesses or authorities.
The US administration has a different view of how privacy issues should be handled by companies and believes business demands are as important, if not more important, than data protection.
Last year, the European Parliament vetoed a deal struck between the US and the commission on sharing bank transfer data with US counter-terrorism investigators. The agreement had to be renegotiated to increase privacy protection before it took effect.
Labour MEP Nessa Childers welcomed the announcement and said it would ensure consumers were protected online. “The industry around personal online data is a recent development, and as such it has until now been a relatively ambiguous one with a considerable legal grey area.”