Expert: Russian law on right to oblivion still arguable, poses risks

MOSCOW, Feb 9 (PRIME) -- Russia’s law on the right to be forgotten in the Internet, which came into force on January 1, implies certain risks for the industry, society and the government, and less public attention is paid to it at the current stage is better as search engines should take time to acclimate, the industry’s representatives said Tuesday at the Cyber Security Forum.

“The Internet industry is charged with alien functions, including collection and checking of passport data of an applicant, as well as heavy fines, which are up to 1 million rubles. Search engines that do not have a legal entity in Russia receive competitive advantages, because they are authorized not to fulfill such applications and in such a way they give a bigger volume of information in a search request,” Artyom Kozlyuk, head of RosKomSvoboda, a public project aimed at self-regulation of the Internet, said at the forum.

Among the perils for society is that the implementation of the law creates blank spaces in the human history and the deleted resources could contain a great deal of other interesting information. There is still a lack of public monitoring of the law’s fulfillment, Kozlyuk said.

The law imposes certain risks for the government itself as it reduces the level of public confidence as the law allows search engines to delete even trustworthy information.

“There is one more threat – that is a possible appearance of a gray market of information. Criminals could monetize it,” Kozlyuk said.

The controversial and much-argued law on the right to oblivion in the Internet was adopted within rather a short period of time. A bill was submitted to the State Duma, the parliament’s lower house, in late May 2015; the document was amended by July 2015 and shortly afterward approved by the State Duma and signed into law by President Vladimir Putin.

Domestic Internet giant Mail.Ru Group criticized the initiative, referring to, among others, a vast circle of information possibly asked to be deleted and an imposition of a controlling function on search system operators.

The Russian Association for Electronic Communications (RAEC) said then that the adoption of the document would limit a constitutional right to look for and receive information by any legal means. The RAEC took an active part in amending of the bill and protecting interests of business.

Matvei Alekseyev from Internet giant Rambler said at the forum that it is impossible to completely erase information from the Internet, as data have numerous copies written in the machine language and can be translated into the human language.

The forum’s participants said that authorities and the Internet community should raise the level of media literacy among citizens so that people would understand what personal data are and how they could correctly contact search engines to exploit their right to be forgotten in the Web.

“We should not attract much attention of users now to the right to oblivion to avoid soaring load on search engines until people are well acquainted with the law and fully informed of the course of its implementation,” the RAEC’s Director Sergei Plugotarenko said.

The law allows people to delete links to unreliable, irrelevant or illegal information. The link should relate only to an applicant as an individual, not a company, and the information asked to be deleted should negatively influence their reputation and dignity.

“The initiative still has one life hack for companies. Search engine operators can send applicants to court, which will make a final decision on every request,” Kozlyuk at RosKomSvoboda said.

(76.8614 rubles – U.S. $1)

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