Websites like Facebook, Instagram and Google that fail to store personal information about their Russian users on servers located inside Russia could be blocked, suggests the bill introduced by former KGB bodyguard, now Duma member for the Liberal Democrats Andrey Lugovoi, Communist member Aleksandr Yushchenko and Liberal Democrat Vadim Dengin. Andrey Lugovoi is by British police suspected of poisoning the former Russian spy Aleksandr Litvinenko with radioactive polonium-210 in London in 2006.
The suggested bill on information technologies will, if approved, enter force in September 2016, reports Izvestia. The newspaper quotes the lawmakers saying all data from large internet companies like search engines, social media networks and e-mail servers should be stored in national located data centers.
Today, many Russian Facebook users have their profiles stored in the huge data center in Luleå, northern Sweden. Also Instagram users got their photos moved to the Facebook infrastructure after the world’s largest social media platform acquired Instagram in 2012.
It is estimated that some 13 million Russians have a Facebook profile whit their data stored abroad. Statistics from Expandedramblings.com suggests Russia has another 4,2 million twitter users and 45 million Google users. Google opened their data center in Finland in 2011, two years before the Facebook center in Luleå opened.
State Duma member Vadim Dengin says to Izvestia that “those data can be used against the country as well as against specific individuals.”
Russia’s own famous search engine, Yandex, will also be seriously hurt if the new legislation enters force. Yandex is set to open a brand new data center outside Helsinki in Finland later this year. The Nordic countries, and the Barents Region, are attractive for huge data centers for two main reasons, low electricity prices and chilly climate that helps cool the massive computer servers.
From before, Yandex has data centers in the Netherlands, the U.S. and within Russia.
