theNetherlands

I think it’s somewhat well known that Yandex is a surveillance capitalist, but I’ve heard Yandex-using westerners comment that they have no ties to Russia. Russian business does not appear to be tightly integrated with western businesses. So I think the attitude has been that if they use Yandex whatever data gets collected is less likely to get intermingled or aggregated with western data leeches data sets.

Consider that when you enter the US, customs & immigration sometimes wants probe into your Twitter and Facebook profiles. In one notable story, a student from the middle east managed to get enrolled into an ivy league university like Harvard or something. Customs looked at his FB acct, saw who his friends were, then saw some anti-American messages by his friends (not him). He was blocked from entry and sent back; did not get to attend the school. I wonder if he were using some Russian social media service instead whether it would been a different outcome.

So this news changes the dynamic a bit. If a Dutch company has backroom access to Yandex’s data collection, Europeans do not get that cross-border sense of privacy they thought they had.

OTOH, Russia seems to have no privacy safeguards. IIRC facial rec DBs are shared to everyone so anyone can snap a pic of someone, ID them with the app, and find out where they live. Netherlands has the GDPR, fwiw. So I guess the question is to what extent Yandex is subject to GDPR rules.