The Ministry of Digital Development decided to expand the list of user data for transfer to security forces

Since 2018, according to the Yarovaya Law, sites on the ARI list must store customer data for six months. These are passport data, residence and registration addresses, information about accounts of other services and IP address.

And from March 2024, an expanded list of information required for storage came into force. It now includes “means of payment” and “electronic geolocation monitoring.” The government made this decision at the request of the Federal Security Service.

Now, as follows from the draft government resolution, which Forbes reviewed, the regulator again wants to supplement the list of information by adding the network port number.

The project explanatory note states that it is very difficult to establish which subscriber operator the IP address belongs to if network addressing technology is used. It is also difficult to detect users from IP addresses assigned to users of virtual servers (VDS/VPS), virtual private networks (VPNs), and proxy servers.

Therefore, law enforcement cannot identify a specific user when they post or send corporate content.

According to the head of the legal practice of the Roskomsvoboda project, Sarkis Darbinyan (recognized as a foreign agent in Russia), if the amendments are adopted, sites will have to abandon foreign services such as Digital Ocean or Cloudflare, which do not share information with Russians. security forces.

“These services help protect against DDoS attacks while hiding the addresses of end users. That’s how they’re built,” Darbinyan said.