During my studies in Paris this past academic year, I took a class called “Security and Technology.” My particular project contrasted European conceptions of online privacy with those of their American counterparts. One of the most fascinating elements of the European approach is the recent push for a “right to be forgotten,” as proposed by Viviane Reding, vice president of the European Commission. Essentially, the doctrine stipulates that everyone should have a right to permanently eliminate private information about themselves if they so desire.

So it is in this vein that Simson L. Garfinkel’s article for the MIT Technology Review takes a peek at the possible future of initiatives like these:

In fact, it’s hard to imagine a system that could index all of the world’s information thoroughly enough to allow someone exercising the “right to be forgotten” to track down and eradicate every regrettable message or photo. More likely, the mechanisms to find that data would cause more privacy violations than they would prevent.

A better solution could be a set of standards for labeling the provenance of information on the Internet. It would be somewhat like the way Facebook requires application developers to keep checking back to see whether personal information is still acceptable to use. It would also take advantage of the privacy-protecting steps that other sites like Twitter and Yahoo sometimes are willing to take for their users.

This could be done using the HTML microdata standard being developed. It is still evolving, but this standard will expand the ways that information in Web pages can be represented in their underlying HTML code. For example, the microdata could include tags designed to facilitate privacy tracking and the retraction of privacy-sensitive information. So if you persuaded a website to take down information because it violates the site’s terms of service, that website could automatically notify others that have made copies of your information, informing them that the license to use the data has been revoked.