When various “extremism fighters” — that is, idlers paid to scour the internet for people criticizing Putin — want to get your personal data from VKontakte, they simply send an email saying: give us all the information you have on this person.
And VK immediately snaps into a servile posture: no problem, here is all the data.
We know it. The “extremism fighters” know it. VK knows it.
Now, at last, this has moved into the courts. The coordinator of our headquarters in Ufa, Lilia Chanysheva, has filed suit as the plaintiff. The local authorities in Bashkortostan (a republic within Russia) are afraid of Chanysheva and try to obstruct her in every way they can, and VK helps them — and there is indisputable proof of that.
The case is being handled by the Agora human rights group. Here is what its head, Pavel Chikov, wrote today:
We understand everything about VKontakte. After all, it belongs to Usmanov. But they could at least ask the police for a court order. In our conditions, what court would refuse Center E (Russia’s anti-extremism police unit)?
Why does VK, on its own initiative, rush to play errand boy for the “siloviki” (security and law enforcement agencies)? I hope this useful and instructive case will at least change the procedures inside the social network.
People