It is official! Just this Thursday, the social networking site LinkedIn is banned for 24 hours in Russia after the company's failure in adhering to the 2015 law requiring Russian's personal data to be stored on an internal server.
Roskomnadzor, Russia's communications regulator said that the social network will be unavailable to the county for 24Hours due to the court ruling of being guilty of violating their data storage law.
Based on the report of Reuters, LinkedIn is aware of the reprimand and is requesting to meet the regulator to discuss their data localization request. The social networking site has more than 6 million subscribers and is the first major communications network to be banned in the country. The app is a US-based company.
Russia has officially banned LinkedIn https://t.co/OO6HjybBYw pic.twitter.com/8faSbYgfAx
— CNN (@CNN) November 18, 2016
The meeting and discussion are expected to happen within the next two weeks but Roskomnadzor had to get approval first from the foreign ministry and the security services for the meeting to pursue given that LinkedIn is a foreign company.
The Kremlin said that the Russians need not worry as the prohibition is legal and has a basis, and that Roskomnadzor is just strictly enforcing the law. They also pointed out that President Vladimir Putin did not intervene in the case.
However, many of its citizens are worried thinking that this blocking is not to protect their privacy and data but about censorship and control. They are concerned that LinkedIn is only the first social site that will be banned and Facebook and Twitter might be the next, as written by BBC.
In the article of Business Insider, Russia is very strict when it comes to enforcing their laws. Russian state watch dog Roskomnadzor has also banned other sites including Wikipedia which was banned last year for featuring an article related to cannabis smoking. The pornography websites like YouPorn and PornHub have been blocked as well since September.
