Translated material
The State Duma has finally banned storing data of Russians outside the Russian Federation. Booking tickets and hotels is in doubt
The State Duma adopted in the third reading a ban on storing data of Russians outside of Russia. According to the portal Slon.ru , 325 deputies voted for the document, and 65 parliamentarians voted against it.
The approved bill obliges foreign companies to store personal data of Russians on servers located in the country. The comments of RAEC experts , who pointed out the lack of information in the law on the organization of cross-border data transfer, were not taken into account by parliamentarians.
Thus, the law actually makes it impossible to book airline tickets and hotels for trips abroad, since most companies providing such services are unlikely to consider it advisable to create the necessary infrastructure on the territory of the Russian Federation and, most likely, will simply leave the Russian market.
All this can lead to complications in the process of obtaining visas to many countries, since the package of necessary documents usually includes both travel tickets and hotel reservation confirmation.
It is important to note that the adopted bill applies not only to companies offering reservation services, but also to other Internet services that have access to personal data of Russians (for example, these could be payment systems, postal services, online stores, etc.) . After the law comes into force, all of them may be blocked by Roskomnadzor if the owner companies do not take care of creating the appropriate infrastructure in Russia in advance.
One of the co-authors of the bill, Vadim Dengin, representing the LDPR faction, however, believes that the law was adopted in the interests of Russians.
“If you haven’t deleted your correspondence from Twitter in three months, it immediately goes to servers in the USA and is stored there. This is where the initiative came from Dengin, Lugovoy and Yushchenko to force such companies to store such data in Russia. Believe me, the majority of Russians they want their data to remain on the territory of the Russian Federation,” Interfax quotes Dengin as saying.
In his microblog on Twitter, the deputy was unable to answer journalist Alexander Plyushchev’s questions regarding the adopted document.
@plushev the law comes into force on September 1, 2016. Why the panic? Or does someone want to save money on protecting the data of Russian citizens?!
— Vadim Dengin (@DENGInV) July 4, 2014After which he accused the journalist of incompetence and alarmism, recalling the scandalous law on“three thousand bloggers” , which will come into force on August 1.
@plushev who told you that he is flawed?! What kind of people?! Internet space?! Who made the corrections about the blogosphere?! Have bloggers fled Russia?
— Vadim Dengin (@DENGInV) July 4, 2014The bill was submitted to the State Duma on June 24 and adopted in the first reading on July 1. If approved by senators and the president, the law will come into force on September 1, 2016.