The European Union is to invest €10m in a project to develop open source privacy tools so that European citizens can safeguard personal information at online communities like Facebook.

The long-term aim of the PrimeLife project is to provide tools which can manage an individual's private data throughout their lifetime of online activity.

PrimeLife is being coordinated by IBM's research laboratory in Zurich and has 14 other partners, including industry bodies such as the World Wide Web Consortium's Pling, Liberty Alliance, ISO/IEC JTC 1 and the International Telecommunication Union.

Online interactions leave an increasing number of digital traces which can be harvested without users' knowledge for nefarious or genuine commercial uses.

PrimeLife aims to empower individuals to tackle these core privacy and trust issues, and counter lifelong personal data trails without compromising functionality.

"We aim to develop a toolbox which you could describe as an integrated electronic data manager," said Jan Camenisch, PrimeLife technical leader at IBM's Zurich Research Lab.

"The data manager provides users with an overview of which personal data he or she uses when, where and how.

"It lets users define default privacy preferences for all kinds of applications, and prompts the user if applications request data for any other purposes."

The project will work on several fronts: human-computer interfaces, configurable policy languages, web service federations, infrastructures and privacy-enhancing cryptography.

The project is an extension of the EU's Privacy and Identity Management in Europe project of which IBM Zurich is the technical lead partner.