With the recent news about EU stating no no to ACTA and giving more customer rights back to customer with digital product, EU seems to be hellbent on making more good impressions to the internet population of it's area.
Today morning in finnish paper Aamulehti, it says roughly this: (mind it's ran through Google translate with small fixes of my own)
http://www.aamulehti.fi/Ulkomaat/119...ohdetuksi.htmlEU Commission proposes the remake of the data protection rules for the Union. These rules should include the so-called right to be forgotten. This means that the user can require a network companies remove all of the information concerning them, if their record has no longer a legitimate reason.
Also the usage of personal information requires a explicit consent of the person. Personal data consists of all the individual data, regardless of whether it is about the private life, professional or public life. They can be names, photos, email addresses, bank account or medical records or social media articles or comments.
It is also proposed that companies and organizations to inform the national data protection authorities of serious security breaches as soon as possible, preferably within a day.
The current EU data protection rules are for 1995, and different countries have taken them along in a different way.
So not only would they be required to make it extremely clear what the sites rules are about (For example Facebook would have to come out very straight what they can do with the data you put up instead of pages of EULA TOS mumbo jumbo stuff where stuff are hidden) but now the person has real chance to get rid of his information in the interwebs, which many of the social sites have not really done thus far.
Also the second bit about companies and stuff would help a lot in the cases like Sony and other security breaches because lot of them have been known to withold information for quite long periods of time.
Surprisingly good time to live in EU if you ignore all that economical crap :O