Will Facebook be banned in Russia? This might happen next year, warned Roskomnadzor’s head Alexander Zharov yesterday, should the social network still fail to comply with the local legislation on personal data storage.
“The law is mandatory for everyone. Either we will [have it] applied or the company will stop operating in Russia,” the RIA news agency quoted Zharov as saying.
Facebook is very popular in the country, Zharov acknowledged, but it is “not a unique service,” he added in a hint to local services Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki, which attract far more Russian users.
Adopted in 2014 and applicable since September 2015, this legislation requires companies operating in Russia to store Russian users’ or clients’ personal data on servers physically located in the country. Many foreign and domestic players are concerned, including global players who tend to store their users’ data in borderless clouds (see white paper by EWDN and EY).
Roskomnadzor not a hardliner
Since then, many businesses — including Alibaba, AliExpress, Apple, Booking.com, eBay, Google, Twitter and Uber — have managed to transfer user data from foreign data centers to Russia or announced ongoing projects to do so.
In some cases, the process was helped by numerous consultations with the regulator’s representatives.
So far Roskomnadzor has not been a hardliner on the issue. In November 2016, it blocked access to LinkedIn for non compliance with the law — but this came more than one year after this law came into force, following a series of exchanges with the company and two court decisions.
The Facebook case, however, could be much more sensitive politically and socially. Just hours after Zharov made his statements, presidential Internet advisor German Klimenko seemed willing to calm down the situation. Roskomnadzor has no concrete plans to ban Facebook: “I called them and they told me so,” Klimenko said.
- See EWDN chief editor Adrien Henni’s op-ed “LinkedIn blocked in Russia: A welcome warning for global players?“
