The company, part of the Yandex group of companies and registered in the Netherlands, was fined 100 million euros for transferring personal data of taxi service users to Russia. About this I mentioned In the press service of the Office of the Data Protection Ombudsman (DPA) of Finland.
The decision was taken jointly by the data protection authorities of the Netherlands, Finland and Norway. The investigation, which began in 2023, was supposed to show whether user data for the Yango service, operating in Finland and Norway, had been transferred to Russia.
“The investigation showed that Yango user data was transferred to Russia without adequate protection. <…> Data protection authorities believe that the company failed to prove that access to personal data by Russian authorities was sufficiently prevented effectively. <…> “The transfer of personal data to Russia must be stopped immediately,” the letter says.
In the press service of MLU male RBC they plan to appeal the decision of the supervisory authorities.
“European Union users’ personal data was stored exclusively within the European Union in pseudonymised and encrypted form, making it technically inaccessible to any third party,” the company claims.
In 2023, Meduza released an investigation in which it concluded that all data from the taxi service Yandex Go, as well as its foreign counterpart Yango, is stored in Russian data centers in the Moscow, Ryazan and Vladimir regions. Before the start of a full-scale war in Ukraine, part of Yango’s data was stored in the company’s data center in the city of Mantsala in Finland. However, for the smooth operation of the service, the information was duplicated in all Yandex data centers without dividing it into flights inside and outside Russia.
Shortly after the material was published, the Finnish Data Protection Ombudsman issued an urgent order suspending the transfer of any personal data of Yango taxi service customers to Russia. The Yandex press service said that information about taxi trips can only be obtained by law enforcement agencies of the country where the trip took place.