Exec says VK to add option of user profile’s full privacy in month

MOSCOW, Aug 13 (PRIME) -- Popular Russian social network VKontakte, owned by Internet company Mail.Ru Group, will add an option of making a user’s profile fully confidential within a month, Managing Director Andrei Rogozov said on Monday.

“Statistics show that the situation with opening criminal cases for publications in the Internet is getting worse with time. VKontakte users are more often involved in such cases. We’re extremely worried by this fact. Law enforcement authorities often ignore the context, do not differentiate posts from reposts, and equal a dubious joke to actions of dangerous criminal crimes,” Rogozov said in a statement on VKontakte.

“As the largest communications platform, VKontakte must follow the Russian laws and help find real criminals, but we decisively oppose unjustified persecution of crimes for publications in the Internet. At that we’re responsible for the services we create.

“We’ve already started introducing additional measures limiting access to users’ materials. Last year we shifted all albums with stored photos into a private mode by default, because not everyone understood the meaning of this album…During the coming two weeks we’ll hide the list of people reposting records by keeping this option only for authors.”

VKontakte will also introduce an option of making a profile fully private except for friends within a month.

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