The lower house of the Russian Parliament, the State Duma, on Tuesday gave initial approval to legislation requiring search engines to remove outdated or irrelevant personal data upon request from users, Reuters reports. The bill, which resembles the EU’s right-to-be-forgotten concept, has some—including the country’s largest search engine, Yandex—concerned it could drive censorship and diminish information valuable to the public interest. Unlike the EU’s version, the Russian bill would require sites to delete data even if the information is in the public’s interest. Yandex said, “The limitations introduced by this bill reflect an imbalance between private and public interests,” adding, “This bill impedes people’s access to important and reliable information or makes it impossible to obtain such information.”
Full Story