A Russian court fined U.S. tech giants WhatsApp, Snapchat and Tinder on Thursday for refusing to store the personal data of Russian users inside the country, as stipulated by the demanding local legislation,
U.S. company Meta, the owner of messaging service Whatsapp, was ordered by Moscow’s Tagansky District Court to pay 18 million rubles (nearly $300,000 at the current exchange rate), according to Interfax, while messaging app Snapchat was told to pay 1 million rubles and dating app Tinder 2 million rubles.
Earlier this month, Apple was also fined for similar violations, as reported by East-West Digital News. A Moscow court court fined the company 2 million rubles (nearly $33,300). This was the first such penalty for Apple in Russia, which had officially notified the authorities, in 2018, that it had moved the concerned data to servers within the country
Russian courts repeatedly fined international companies for not complying with this legislation. For example in August last year Facebook and Twitter were fined 15 million rubles (some $200,000 at the exchange rate of that time) and 17 million rubles ($230,000), respectively, for repeat infractions, while WhatsApp was required to pay 4 million rubles ($54,000) for a first-time offense. Just weeks before Google was imposed a first-time fine of 3 million rubles for failing to move Russian users’ data to domestic servers.
According to the law, companies operating in Russia are required to store Russian users’ or clients’ personal data on servers physically located in the country. Numerous foreign and domestic players were concerned, including global players who tended to store their users’ data in borderless clouds (see white paper by EWDN and EY). A range of international businesses — including, in particular, Alibaba, AliExpress, Apple, Booking.com, LG Electronics, Microsoft, PayPal and Samsung — have managed to transfer user data from foreign data centers to Russia.
But several key international companies have been less law-abiding, playing cat-and-mouse with the Russian authorities for years already. In 2016, the authorities went as far as blocking access to blocking access to LinkedIn, for non compliance.
