Photo: Niall Carson/PA Wire/PA Images. All rights reserved.“The one thing that compensates for the strictness of Russian laws is the lack of necessity to follow them”. The Russian writer Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin may have penned this aphorism in the mid-19th century, but it’s still relevant in 2018 – especially when discussing the specifics of doing business in Russia and interacting with the Russian government.
A recent practical lesson in this reality emerged when president Putin signed the Personal Data Domestication Law (PDDL) in 2015. The PDDL, effective from 1 September 2015, demanded that every piece of personal data of Russian citizens operated by any online service should be stored in a data warehouse within the Russian Federation’s geographical borders.
This is a quite remarkable (and typical) piece of Russia’s legislative absurdity. Imagine a small online store somewhere in France selling, for instance, carpets. It stores its customers’ data on a cloud service without even knowing the whereabouts of physical servers. In France? Iceland? Is the data somehow distributed throughout the globe by the hosting service provider? Even if the store managed to somehow separate its customers with Russian citizenship (and here don’t forget the homesick employees of the French embassy in Moscow ordering carpets from home, still not being subject to the PDDL), it is hard to imagine our hypothetical store would be capable to setup technical infrastructure to comply with the PDDL.
