Coronavirus as an excuse. Wheely elite taxi service argued with the Moscow City Hall about privacy against the background of quarantine

Since mid -April, Moscow has been suspended in Moscow all car orders not registered as a taxi. Only one company - Wheely, has decided to object to the city hall publicly. Alexander Borodikhin tells a story in which Deptrans, under the pretext of quarantine, closes the last gaps in the passenger transportation system, and the young son of the ex-governor of the Perm Territory, unexpectedly for everyone, turns out to be a defender of electronic rights and freedoms.

- What phrase did Parabikovyen say when she got into the car to Solovchuk? - A year ago, the judge of the Presnensky district court, Elena Abramova, asked the football player Pavel Mamaev. Vitaly Solovchuk, who parked the white Mercedes near the Moscow Club “Egoist” on the morning of October 8, 2018, was involved in the conflict with Zenit striker Alexander Kokorin and his friends. The girlfriend of athletes Alexander Pozdleykovyen mistakenly got into someone else's car, the driver made her remark, word for her word, and a fight began; According to the results of the incident, Solovchuk was recognized as the victims.

“She told me that the driver told her that he was not a taxi driver.” "Are you probably a driver of Alexander or one of the guys?" - answered Judge Mamaev.

- And could the driver be there at all?

- Of course, I have 90% of friends with drivers.

Mamaev explained that for ordering a car, friends used the Wheely service, whose park for the most part was equipped with Mercedes cars of the business class classes (E and S). The application through which the inhabitants of Moscow, London, Paris and several Russian cities can call a personal driver, has been working in Russia since 2012. In Moscow, St. Petersburg, Sochi and Yekaterinburg, Mercedes sedans are available for order, in Kazan, Perm and Krasnodar - cars of more budget brands.

Wheely has one and a half hundred people work in the offices of the company. In Moscow, Wheely has 2.8 thousand drivers and 87 thousand customers - such data are given by its founder Anton Chirkunov in an open letter to Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin. For the sake of this businessman, the businessman has forced Moscow quarantine for coronavirus for this circulation of the businessman: since mid -April, there is a ban on transportation on cars without a taxi license in the capital.

“This is due to the fact that the permission to carry out the transportation of passengers, required by the new decree, is issued only by drivers of yellow and white taxi cars,” said Anatoly Smorgonsky, CEO of Gett in Russia. -Black business class taxis work under chartering agreements. New instructions do not take into account this class of taxa. ”

The masses of Yandex.Taxi, Uber and Gett did not argue with the decision of the city hall: they simply made premium their optences inaccessible in their applications; However, later Gett returned the “updated business class”. “In order to provide our customers with increased class machines during a period of increased readiness, we comply with all the necessary requirements prescribed by the regulatory documents of the Moscow Government,” the Commersant told the press service of another Citybir aggregator, without specifying when orders for the tariff “Business” are resumed.

For Wheely, which does not offer a budget segment, in principle, the ban meant a complete suspension of work; The company was able to only add the “Personal Assistant” tariff for ordering products or drugs and transporting documents.

“Why were we left without work? Because a taxi license in Moscow is not given to the driver, but to transport: to get it, it is enough to paint the car in yellow, buy a taximeter and an orange “saber”, ”Chirkunov was indignant in a letter to Sobyanin.

The city hall represented by the Deputy Mayor for Economic Policy and Property and Foreign Relations of Vladimir Efimova answered the young businessman the very next day: “Following the results of the held meeting of the Economic Staff, we discussed with colleagues from the transport complex to admit premium taxi and personal drivers' services. Such requirements are adapted to carriers and do not relate to the color of the car, they are already prepared, subject to their implementation, these services will be able to return to work. ”

The decision of the capital's authorities Wheely did not rejoice: the company demanded to transfer to the Unified Regional Navigation and Information System of Moscow (Yernis) the location of all cars online, as well as data on driver and sanitary events. The deputy head of the Department of Transport Dmitry Pronin, polemicizing with Chirkunov, stopped a step away from admitting: the city hall used the Pandemia of Coronavirus as an excuse to include a premium taxi segment in the general transport control system. He said that since 2018, officials have tried to get cooperation from companies, but "they have never received their consent, although tens of thousands of professional taxi drivers in Moscow and the Moscow Region perform them daily."

The Moscow taxi services have obliged to provide information about drivers and their cars to the Ernis system back in 2017. Then it was about the location of the car indicating the status in the format is free/busy. In September 2019, the Moscow City Hall significantly expanded the list of data for transfer to Yernis, and now companies are required to provide not only detailed data on status (free, accepts orders/free, does not accept orders/busy without a passenger/busy with a passenger), but also personal data of the driver: name, driver’s length of service, driver’s number, data on the driver’s license and insurance.

The Moscow City Hall adopted the new resolution without discussion with representatives of the industry, Kommersant wrote . The source of the newspaper in one of the companies argued that the fulfillment of the requirements would incur significant costs and require changes in the software, which "will ultimately be entrusted to consumers."

On May 8, Anton Chirkunov again had to make a public appeal - this time to Wheely clients. In it, the businessman tried on the role of the defender of digital rights and freedoms, called the Ermanis system “God” for the Moscow Department of Transport and referred to the solutions of Apple and Google on privacy issues. “As far as we know, the department insists on the transfer of the geolocation of all real -time drivers. Such a requirement of Wheely will dispute, ”Chirkunov emphasized. - The data transfer requirement is not related to pandemia and restrictions introduced now - it appeared back in 2017. For us, this is a fundamental question. ”

The head of Wheely emphasized that the data required by the mayor's surveillance of the driver and indirect - the passenger: “If the passenger’s address is known - and this can be a lawyer, a journalist, and a politician, then it is not difficult to track all the trips from this point and establish where he went and where he met.” Moreover, the data is proposed to be transmitted in unusual form, Chirkunov emphasized.

“We work in different countries of the world and everywhere we observe the law, whether we like it or not. Now no law of the Russian Federation establishes the obligation to transfer the geolocation of cars engaged in the transportation of passengers - especially in real time, ”concluded a young businessman.

"I am supporting and proud!" - his father, the former governor of the Perm Territory Oleg Chirkunov, replaced the appeal.

On May 12, the Moscow Department of Transport reported on the resumption of premium transportation services under chartering agreements: they will transfer “tracks for all their cars and data on drivers online.” Today's publications of Kommersant on this topic are contradictory: first the text came out that Wheely began to work, after conducting “integration with the information technology department” to check digital passes before ordering a car, although the company still does not intend to transfer data on geolocation to Yernis. After a few hours, news on the continuation of trips appeared on the publication’s website only in the format of the “Personal Assistant” service (delivery of products and orders).

After the publication of the material with the Mediazone, the former Vice President of Wheely in communications Maria Glazkova contacted, which confirmed that passenger transportation was not resumed. “On May 7, a decree was issued in which, in order to resume transportation, transportation services are required to fulfill sanitary standards and transfer data to the Department of Transport of the city of Moscow,” she reported the position of the company. - According to the sanitary standards, Wheely reported to Rospotrebnazor in March. Regarding the transfer of data, the service position is indicated in the open circulation on the company's website. At the moment, Wheely is expecting a normative act from the Department of Transport with further clarifications. ”

The company emphasized that along with the Department of Information Technology of Moscow launched checks of passes before ordering trips through the application: “Thus, the requirement of transportation of only those passengers who have an existing pass is executed in the framework of counteracting the spread of coronaviral infection.”

“Anton graduated from the University of St. Gallene in Switzerland,” the company quotes the biography of its founder on the official website. -In 2010, Anton created Wheely as an online platform for ordering a taxi and minicabs. Two years later, he decided to switch to the premium market. Since then, the company has been growing and developing. ”

“In almost all articles about Wheely and you are mentioned that you are the son of a former governor of the Perm Territory,” Anton Chirkunova asked a correspondent for a magazine for Zima Magazine Russians living in the UK. “I really don’t know why,” the young man answered. -For some reason, journalists consider this important. Why - it’s not clear to me. It seems to me that even when I will be 60 years old and I will build a company of several billion dollars of capitalization, everyone will still write in the articles: "The son of an ex-governor."

Oleg Chirkunov, who headed the Perm Territory until 2012, was remembered primarily by his experiments on the cultural transformation of the region: with him, Galerist Marat Gelman developed the Permm Museum of Modern Art, and the conductor Theodor Krentzis was the Dyagilev festival. With the resignation of Chirkunov, the Perm cultural project disappeared from the news, and the ex-governor himself was a donkey in the foothills of the Pyrenees : “A real French province, one of the main wine regions. There are no Russians here ”; The Pandemia of Coronavirus found him in London.

Anton, which grew up in Switzerland, made a trip in the opposite direction from Europe to Russia: in 2009, reports appeared on the appointment of a 23-year-old young man as an adviser to the deputy prime minister of the region on industry and business. “Previously, I was reproached for the fact that [my son] lives and studies abroad. In the case they reproached-he studied and lived abroad, -commented on the publications of Chirkunov Sr.. “Last Saturday, he received a bachelor's diploma, came to Russia and told me that he wanted to take a break in his studies in order to start working.” The Deputy Prime Minister himself explained that Chirkunov Jr. would work "on a voluntary basis."

Wheely service indicated by Kommersant, owns Vili Holding LLC, in which Anton Chirkunov belongs to 59.6% of the shares. According to him, the first investments in the project amounted to $ 2.5 million, "borrowed from relatives and friends." In 2018, the total volume of attracted investments in 2018 estimated at $ 13 million, including “personal funds of the founder”, as well as grants from Yuri Milner and Pavel Durov (25 thousand dollars) and the Fund for Promoting Innovation (5.9 million rubles). “Vedomosti” wrote that in 2019 the service attracted $ 15 million investments from the British venture fund of the Concentric and private investors; CONCENTRIC partner Denis Shafranik is the son of former Minister of Energy Yuri Sharfranik.

Editor: Dmitry Tkachev

Updated at 16:35. Added comment by Wheely.