Introduction
On 30 January 2019 a website owner appealed a judgment of the
Tagansky First-Instance District Court of Moscow – which had
restricted access to a website due to personal data breaches
– to the Moscow City Court (02-4261/2018)1.
According to the first-instance court, the website owner had:
- collected and processed user information which constituted
personal data through Google Analytics and its Russian equivalent,
Yandex Metrica; and
- failed to meet the data protection requirements prescribed by
the Federal Law on Personal Data 2006 (152-FZ) (PDL).
Prior to this case, the majority of the Russian internet
community had not considered statistical information concerning web
traffic and user actions to constitute personal data. As such,
Russian websites frequently used Google Analytics and Yandex
Metrica without following the PDL. Roscomnadzor (the Russian data
protection authority), which is the plaintiff in this case, will
have to prove that the
