WEEK 11. IT/Censorship, Privacy and Internet

In some countries censorship and privacy come along. I would like to bring up some recent history of Russian censorship and privacy violation. Starting from the year 2013, there has been a succession of blockings ordered by Roskomnazdor, with the most notorious of these being LinkedIn ban in 2016 and Telegram in 2018.

According to the Russian "On Personal Data" law, any Russian or foreign company operating with Russian users, must record, store and systemize data using databases on the Russian territory. LinkedIn has been accused of violation of the mentioned policy and was therefore shutdown on the Russian territory until now.

While the story with LinkedIn is sad, but somewhat understandable, events related to the Telegram ban, seem absurd to me. In April 2018, Telegram was ordered to be banned by court because of their refuse to grant the Federal Security Service access to the encrypted user messaging data. Around 16 million IP addresses have been blocked in Russia in attempt to restrict access to Telegram. By accident a huge number of other resources on the internet have been banned such as Mastercard SecureCode, Mail.ru's TamTam messaging service, Twitch and many-many others. Those remained blocked for a month. Funny enough, alright Telegram has had some minor perturbations in its operation back in 2018, it is fully functioning and remains very popular on the Russian territory until nowadays. 

It's hard for me to judge censorship adequately after being grown in a country which is known to abuse it. I believe, there are cases when censorship is the only way to go, but in the majority of situations it's probably more sensible to properly regulate the resources instead of shutting them down.