Yandex subsidiary fined for transferring Yango taxi users’ personal data to Russia

Source: Office of the Data Protection Ombudsman of Finland

A Dutch-registered subsidiary of technology company Yandex has been fined 100 million euros for transferring the personal data of users of the Yango taxi service to Russia, Finland’s Data Protection Ombudsman announced. The company, MLU B.V., is part of the Yandex group and registered in the Netherlands.

The decision was reached jointly by the data protection authorities of the Netherlands, Finland, and Norway. Launched in 2023, the investigation set out to determine whether data belonging to Yango users in Finland and Norway was being transferred to Russia.

Investigators found that Yango user data had been transferred to Russia without adequate protection, that the company had failed to demonstrate sufficiently that Russian authorities’ access to personal data had been prevented, and that the transfers must stop immediately.

MLU’s press office told the Russian business news outlet RBC that the company plans to appeal the regulators’ decision.

“The personal data of EU users was stored exclusively within the EU in pseudonymized and encrypted form, which technically made it inaccessible to any third parties,” the company said.

In 2023, Meduza published an investigation finding that all data from the Yandex Go taxi service and its international counterpart Yango was stored in Russian data centers in the Moscow, Ryazan, and Vladimir regions. Before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, some Yango data had been stored at the company’s data center in Mantsala, Finland — but to ensure uninterrupted service, information was duplicated across all of Yandex’s data centers with no separation between trips made in Russia and those made abroad.

Shortly after the investigation was published, Finland’s Office of the Data Protection Ombudsman issued an emergency order suspending the transfer of any Yango taxi customers’ personal data to Russia. Yandex’s press office said that information about taxi rides could only be obtained by law enforcement authorities in the country where the ride took place.

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Yandex subsidiary fined for transferring Yango taxi users’ personal data to Russia

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