This June the State Duma of Russian Federation approved a law which requires Internet businesses to keep personal data of their customers only within Russia, beginning from September 1, 2016. Besides, citizens could request to delete their personal data from the Web in case a court would find that this information appeared there illegally.

A citizen can make such a claim to the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media (or Roskomnadzor). In such a case the Roskomnadzor would use Internet provider’s help to make the internet company who has violated the law to delete this data from the Web. In case the Service and the owner of this web resource could not reach a compromise, the Roskomnadzor will request from the telecom providers to restrict access to this resource, sending them its domain name, IP and URLs of specific pages. A register of web resources that are violating the rights of personal data subjects should have been created by the time the new law would come into force.

This law was actively criticized within the Russian Internet community. The Russian Association of Electronic Communications (RAEC) expressed fear that because of the new law ‘it will become impossible to provide many of the global services’ to Russian citizens. ‘For example, [it will be impossible] to book tickets on foreign airline companies’ websites because collecting and storing personal data will be performed on the territory of a country where such a company is based’, said RAEC’s representatives. ‘It will be impossible to use the online hotel booking systems, because customers’ personal data will be stored on servers situated in the same countries where those hotels are situated.’

But these considerations did not make members of the parliament change their mind. On September 1st, Vadim Dengin from LDPR, Alexandr Yushtshenko from the Communist Party and Yevgeny Fedorov from United Russia proposed to speed up the process of adoption of the controversial law. Their goal was to make it come into force on January 1st, 2015. In their opinion, this ‘would make a contribution to faster and more efficient securing of Russian citizens’ rights for protection of their personal data and private correspondence in information and telecommunication networks’.

The situation is changing very fast in the digital world, as Yushtshenko explained to his colleagues when arguing the necessity of adoption of this law during its discussion in the first reading. He was supported by Leonid Levin, the first deputy of the Head of the Communications and Information Policy Committee who said that ‘the worldwide situation has escalated’. ‘It looks quite probable that personal data of our citizens can be not only collected but also illegally utilized, massively,’ added he to prove that this initiative is timely.

Levin did not go into details about illegal ways of utilizing personal data, except for one example. He talked about electronic school student’s record books. Data received by this software is used by students’ parents who can supervise their children’s studying; but at the same time this data can be stored on foreign serves. ‘Even the brief analysis shows that this service [the electronic school student’s record book] is provided with the help of informational systems by commercial organizations. It mostly does not use the unified portal of state services. In several cases hosting was provided by foreign companies whose servers are beyond the jurisdiction of Russian Federation’, stated Levin. He also noted that basic agreements between educational institutions and users of electronic record books either are not signed or do not contain any information about locations of personal data storage. According to him, this state of affairs ‘completely eliminates any responsibility of these resources for loss or inappropriate usage of data in this system’.

Levin also was anxious about school websites containing too much information about parents’ social and professional positions and medical information about children (such as lists of pupils who were sent to psychoneurological examination). ‘Even bigger volumes of information are kept on medical and transportation organizations’ websites’, said he. ‘Misuse of this information could potentially cause significant damage to the state security of Russian Federation’.