Russian Internet center agrees to cooperate with search engines

MOSCOW, Apr 18 (PRIME) -- Russia’s non-commercial Regional Public Center of Internet Technologies (ROCIT) signed on Monday a memorandum of cooperation with several of the country’s leading Internet companies, including Yandex and Mail.Ru Group, on partnership within the law on the right to be forgotten in the Internet.

“The law, also known as the right to oblivion, in force since January 1, had been actively discussed in (the parliament’s lower house) State Duma during 2015. It’s useful for ordinary users. The law is a right of any user to ask search engines to delete untrustworthy information. It should become a trigger in cooperation of society and business,” ROCIT Director Sergei Grebennikov told reporters at a news conference.

Leonid Levin, chairman of ROCIT’s management board and chairman of the State Duma’s information policy committee, said that the bill had been revised and amended before being signed into the law.

“Today we have a rather working system allowing citizens to address search engines with a request to delete certain unreliable or obsolete information…ROCIT and the search engines will assist citizens in using the law,” Levin said.

ROCIT is not just a watchdog for the respect of citizens’ rights in the Internet, but it is also an organization that will help improve people’s IT literacy, the official said.

The center also broadly cooperates with many companies, including U.S. giant Google, which respects the local law, he said. “Google is interested in transparency of all its activities in Russia,” Levin said.

The memorandum is aimed at assisting users in understanding of the right to be forgotten in the Internet, the procedure of submitting requests and options of going to court to insist on their positions.

“If a user wants certain links to some untrustworthy or obsolete information to be deleted, they should send a Web form to the search engines that offer these links,” Urvan Parfentyev, a coordinator of ROCIT’s projects in the sphere of digital security, said.

“The user should collect such links, find these sites, indicate what category is concerned, point out their opinion what is wrong, add any proof and indicate personal data. It’s better to add a scan of a passport. The information is then sent to search engines. Companies study the case during 10 working days and make a decision. If the complaint is incomplete, the search engine does not find the necessity of deleting information, and the case can be filed to court. The mechanism is clear.”

Marina Yanina, vice president for corporate relations at Yandex, said that many users do not understand how to apply the law. People hope that search engines will check the information themselves, but in many cases only law enforcement entities can do it, she said.

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