EU regulation gone sane

A lot of people have nasty things to say about European over-regulation, but there's a number of instances of the EU doing the rest of the world an awful lot of good. The Microsoft anti-trust case was one. This is another. From The Guardian:

The European Union is to enshrine a "right to be forgotten online". [...]
In a package of proposals to be unveiled before the summer, [EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding] intends to force Facebook and other social networking sites to make high standards of data privacy the default setting and give control over data back to the user."I want to explicitly clarify that people shall have the right – and not only the possibility – to withdraw their consent to data processing," Reding said. "The burden of proof should be on data controllers – those who process your personal data. They must prove that they need to keep the data, rather than individuals having to prove that collecting their data is not necessary."

This is great news. Privacy issues related to the internet are an increasingly important area, so it's nice to see the EU being so proactive (and in a positive way, no less!).