By Lara Holmes

The European Commission (EC) presented on Wednesday a proposal to tighten the protection of personal data on the Internet that if approved would cause several drawbacks to social networking sites like Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.

The personal data protection is a fundamental right for all Europeans, but people do not always feel in control of their personal data, said the European Commissioner responsible for Justice and Fundamental Rights, Viviane Reding with her proposal.

The goal of the comprehensive reform of data protection law dating back to 1995 is to strengthen individual rights on the Internet and boost the digital economy in Europe, it said.

Against the offending companies, the European proposal proposes penalties of up to a million or a fine of between 2% to 5% of the turnover of a company.

The European Union (EU) and individual liberties advocates argue that the personal data on the Internet have become a gold mine. Millions of people connect to the Internet daily and leave their personal data recorded as the date and place of birth, college, work, tastes or interests, photos, bank account numbers, credit card, passport or geographic location.

And the people are shocked when they understand what happens to their data, said Reding. These data are used by all companies in the world: from insurance companies, to banks or social networking sites and search engines like Google.

The European proposal for Internet users is that they know clearly what they are sending and what for.

And in the opinion of industry experts, the collection of personal data grows increasingly embracing physical and psychological information of users, who do not know how far they are being spied on turning our societies into a Big Brother kind of giant, useful for market research companies.

The community standard is intended inter alia to guarantee the Right to oblivion in social networks, allowing users to demand that companies like Facebook erase all their personal data when they unsubscribe to the service.

This right to oblivion became important after the case of a student residing in Vienna, Max Schrems, who under cover of a European directive called on Facebook to send him all the information they had on him.

The surprise came when Facebook gave him a CD with more than 1,200 documents, including transcripts of chats, friend requests, event notifications, status, photos, among others, that he had removed.

Thus began the project of Europe to sue Facebook for social networking, used by 800,000 million users worldwide, to avoid keeping information without their consent

Reding said that with the European directive none of this will happen again.

And according to a source close to the case, the European project is too ambitious and probably will never see the light of day.