Press Release, 28.04.2020

Grigory Yavlinsky, Chairman of the Federal Political Committee of the Yabloko party, proposed to create Public Commission for control over the use of digital technologies by the state. He wrote about this in his article called Digital Danger, published by the Novaya Gazeta newspaper today .  The Public Commission should include IT specialists, lawyers, public figures and human rights defenders.

The purpose of the Commission is to monitor and demand from the state verified guarantees that digital technologies for tracking people are used strictly in their interests and in full compliance with the obligations in the field of human rights. The Commission should receive the most complete information on the measures taken by the state and be able to make changes in the procedures up to their cancellation.

According to the leader of Yabloko, today the Public Commission must demand the guarantees that:

– collection, storage and consolidation of an increased amount of personal data, including on health status, are carried out solely in order to respond to the pandemic;

– the data collected, stored and aggregated so that to respond to the pandemic should be limited in scope;

– work with these data should be limited to the pandemic period;

– the data are not used for commercial and any other purposes.

In the future, the Public Commission should demand from the government agencies to ensure sufficient security for any set of personal data collected and received from any devices and by means of any networks or services.

Full clarity is needed regarding what information the authorities collect and what they pass on to third parties. In particular, tracking mechanisms introduced in response to the pandemic should not be the responsibility of intelligence or security services, the Yabloko leader emphasises.

Grigory Yavlinsky also notes in the article that the problem of the state’s abuse of digital technologies is urgent throughout the world, however, in Russia in the conditions of a non-transparent unlawful corporate-authoritarian state, the use of invasive electronic tracking systems critically threatens not only the right of citizens to privacy, freedom of expression and freedom of association, but also their personal safety in the true sense of the word.