VK says to contest court’s rejection of lawsuit for user data

MOSCOW, Feb 15 (PRIME) -- Social network VKontakte will contest the Moscow Arbitration Court’s rejection of its lawsuit seeking to ban Skolkovo-based firm Double Data from taking users’ personal information from the network and exploiting it for commercial purposes, a VKontakte spokesperson told PRIME late on February 12.

“We believe and still think that actions of Double Data infringe our rights and the rights of VKontakte users. We’ll challenge this motion,” the spokesperson said.

“The VKontakte users trust their environment and the familiar floor, and we should live up to their trust. The fact that some data is public does not mean that it can be used in any way.”

In the lawsuit, seen by lawyers as historic for the use of big data in the country, the social network demanded to find extraction and exploitation of information about users violation of its rights for databases, ban such practice, and destroy the earlier extracted elements, and claim 1 ruble from the respondent.

The precedent was that the matter covered processing of public information released on the Internet.

The lawsuit was filed in January 2017 when VKontakte learnt that Double Data offered to search and study data of social networks’ users to assess solvency of potential and existing borrowers.

(73.9378 rubles – U.S. $1)

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