The FSB has developed a draft government decree, according to which the secret service will be able to demand out of court to provide it with information from the databases of taxi aggregators, Vedomosti writes.
According to the document, if it enters into force on September 1 this year, taxi ordering services will be required to provide law enforcement officers with “round-the-clock remote access” to their databases, in which applications for the service are stored, processed and transmitted. Aggregators will be required to provide other requested information within 3 to 10 business days.
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“These Rules establish the procedure for the service of ordering a passenger taxi to provide access to the federal executive body in the field of security or its territorial body to information systems and databases used to receive, store, process and transmit orders for a passenger taxi,” the draft resolution says.
The intelligence service also proposed expanding the list of information available to the FSB to include electronic monitoring of geolocation and data on means of payment.
In December 2022, the State Duma adopted amendments on taxi aggregators developed by the Ministry of Transport. According to them, carriers are required to enter orders in a journal, access to which will have the FSB.
The new law implies the creation of a unified and regional taxi registries. Aggregators will be required to open representative offices in the regions. Taxi companies and self-employed drivers are now required to keep an “electronic or hard copy” order book and store (on Russian servers only) all information from it for six months. At the request of law enforcement agencies, drivers will be required to provide such a log, and the security agencies will have access to the database of units from the very beginning.
In January 2022, four Yandex services – Yandex.Taxi, Yandex.Food, Yandex.Lavka, Yandex.Micromobility – were included in the list of information dissemination organizers (ARI). Companies included in this list are required to collect, store and, at the request of the security forces, transfer user data, the content of their correspondence, calls and all other actions.
In 2014, such company services as Yandex.Mail, Yandex.Disk and Yandex.MyCircle were the first to enter the ARI register, in 2019 Yandex.Zen was included in it, in 2020 – Yandex. Real Estate”, “Avto.ru”, “Yandex.Market” and “Beru.ru”.
In 2020, as recalled by Roskomsvoboda, the Yandex.Taxi service, which was not included in the ARI list at that time, handed over the history of trips to the security forces in the case of Meduza journalist Ivan Golunov. This case was fabricated, and the security forces involved in it were held accountable. Then the press secretary of “Yandex.Taxi” Natalya Rozhkova, at the request of “Mediazona”, confirmed the fact of data transfer.
She said that the service is obliged to provide data on official law enforcement requests. “As a rule, law enforcement agencies do not provide details of the case in requests, whether a person is a suspect or, conversely, a victim. From practice, we know that providing information is important for solving crimes and sometimes helps save someone’s life,” said Rozhkova.
