Russians have expressed their overwhelming support for proposed new legislation governing personal data. According to a recent opinion poll, less than 3.5% of Russians feel their personal details are safe, while almost 25% believe they are anything but secure.
The ROMIR Monitoring agency carried out the research, polling 1,600 Russians in approximately half of the country's regions. The aim of the survey was to ascertain the attitude of ordinary Russians to the legal bill “On personal data” currently being considered in parliament, the State Duma. The results made the views of the country very clear.
Only 3.4% of those polled were confident that their personal data were protected, while 24.4% had quite the opposite view. The other respondents were either less explicit in their views, or had no opinion on the matter. 74.1% of those who took part in the poll supported tough measures to counter the distribution of pirate copies of databases belonging to organizations like the traffic police, telephone operators, and property registers. A further 63.3% believe that the state has an obligation to control the use of personal data by commercial bodies. These figures suggest that legislation on the collection and processing of personal information is long overdue.
According to Mikhail Yakushev, director of the legal department at the Ministry of Information Technology and Communications, databases in Russia are stored like literary collections. The law on personal data, which the State Duma has already approved at a first reading, will allow the authorities to curtail the illegal use of private information by various structures.
Any personal information taken from an individual without their official consent will be considered illegal. Moreover, the law currently being considered by the State Duma would mean the gathering of information must conform to clearly stated goals. In other words, organizations would not be allowed to possess any “superfluous” information about Russian citizens. The law also stipulates the use of fines to punish any infringements, though the future may well see the introduction of jail terms for more serious cases.
The personal data law would protect not only the private lives of Russians but also combat spam; according to Mikhail Yakushev, the law will also apply to information about people on the Internet. For instance, the creation of a database made up of e-mail addresses for the purpose of distributing spam would be considered unlawful on the grounds that an address appears in the database without the agreement of the individual who received the unwanted message.
Earlier it was made clear that a new agency would be formed within the framework of the new law which would monitor commercial structures working with private data. The agency's duties would include: carrying out checks on systems that process personal data even before the operator is registered; demanding that inauthentic or illegally acquired data be blocked or deleted; imposing permanent or temporary bans on the processing of personal data, and carrying out investigations into any infringements of the law. In this way, the lawmakers plan to assert effective control over the use of personal data throughout Russia.
“If all those powers really are given to that state body and they are not just on paper, then it means Russia will get one of the most effective systems in the world for controlling the use of private data. Functions like the preliminary inspection of the IT infrastructure at a company wanting to work with private data would allow a regulatory body to effectively manage the security of private records. We can't wait for the State Duma to approve the bill and for the president to sign it into law,” Denis Zenkin, marketing director at InfoWatch, commented.
