What if you could essentially fake your death online—completely delete any trace of yourself from Facebook, Twitter, blogs, forums, Usenet, and anywhere else there might be some record of your existence. Such a concept is largely impossible today, especially given complications from services like Facebook combined with caches and mirrors of practically everything ever e-created.

The European Commission wants to change that. As part of its newly outlined data protection reform strategy, the EU says it believes individuals have a "right to be forgotten." That is, people should be able to give informed consent to every site or service that processes their data, and they should also have the right to ask for all of their data to be deleted. If companies don't comply, the EU wants citizens to be able to sue.

"The protection of personal data is a fundamental right. We need clear and consistent data protection rules," EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding said in a statement.

Reding wants to strengthen the EU's already existing data protection rules, which date back to 1995 when Facebook was still just a gleam in Mark Zuckerberg's preadolescent eye. The EU acknowledges that technology has changed a lot since then; the Internet, mobile devices, user-generated content, and more have all exploded in popularity, each new technology throwing fresh wrenches into old laws.

The new guidelines focus on more than just the right to be forgotten—the EU wants to cover most aspects of an individual's personal data and how it can be used. For example, rules for how someone's personal information can be used in a police or criminal justice setting will be changed, as well as how citizens can securely transfer their data to places outside the EU.

The obvious goal is to help mitigate incidents like the recent discovery that some Facebook apps were selling user data to third parties. Still, such a change could be logistically difficult, at least if Internet companies want to keep operating the way they currently do. Most Internet users are recipients of targeted advertising, for example, even though they have not explicitly agreed to have their online movements tracked for that purpose (targeted advertising is almost always an opt-out service). In fact, most services that are "free" to users depend upon using (or selling) user data in some way or another; it's clear that such a rule could complicate how free services operate pretty quickly.

There are questions that go beyond targeted advertising, too. Search services—Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc.—tend to keep "anonymized" search data for several months before deleting it. Does search history count as user data, even if the IP has been scrambled or deleted? And on Facebook, can a person request that photos posted by other people that include him or her be removed too, and sue over it? What happens to the Wayback Machine's archives of your old website should you decide to commit e-seppuku?

Not all of the questions will be answered anytime soon, but the Commission is asking for public feedback through January 15, 2011. After that, an actual proposal will be formulated, along with projected frameworks for how the new rules will be implemented and enforced. Until then, users will have to make sure their data stays private the old fashioned way: by becoming an Internet hermit.