European Union plans to adopt a new legislation that obligates social networking websites like Facebook and search engines like Google to keep users’ privacy and in case they fail to obey the rules these companies would face court action, European Union justice chief Viviane Reding said on Wednesday.

In the coming month Reding will be proposing to amend the EU's 16-year-old laws on data protection to provide more reservations for private information protection. These protections mainly target such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft or Yahoo, because of rising worries about how they use information they collect about users' personal habits.

Reding wants to force companies to allow Internet users to withdraw any data held by the websites, calling it the "right to be forgotten," as well as make the firms provide more information on what data is collected and for what purpose.

It should be noted that many of the Internet companies who provide their services in Europe has their servers based in the United States or at least they hold data on US servers. Thus, Reding says that agencies watching over privacy issues in EU countries should be given more powers to enforce compliance outside Europe.

Reding's proposals, expected before July, would have to be approved by EU governments and by the European Parliament.