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Comment by bostand | Hacker News Reader

Is linkedin being singled out or is this start of something bigger?

Nothing unexpected is happening. They have a law that requires storing Russian nationals' data on servers physically located in Russia. Linkedin refused to follow the law and got what was coming. While the law isn't that great, it is still there to be complied with.

Except that almost nobody complies with that law. This is more like making an example out of a linkedin and attempting to gain power over internet companies, they have been doing this for a few years already.

Well, it all doesn't work like that. "Hey guys, nobody follows this law, so neither should we!" - Nope.

> it...doesn't work like that

That's exactly how it works in Russia.

Kind of. Except for when you get noticed or become too big to skip.

It can (and should) actually work like that. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yick_Wo_v._Hopkins ("Racially discriminatory application of a racially neutral statute violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.")

I think it's more of an internet company trying to run a business in a country without respecting the law which applies to you if you do business there. This is in fact the case for many countries beside Russia and there is no valid reason for another country to allow a company, which is running operations from a country known to not respecting a persons privacy regardless of its citizenship, to run a business in your country without been able to protect your citizens.

Didn't you know that Silicon Valley has the moral high ground? Duh. Americans can do no wrong /s

This is exactly the same in China, coupled with the ICP license that makes for total control of what is accessible in the territory.

My understanding is that China requires that data for Chinese citizens is only stored in China (you can maybe export aggregate, anonymous data).

Russia on the other hand requires that data for Russian citizens be stored in Russia. I don't believe they prevent export.

I've heard of large companies complying by simply uploading a tarball to a Russian server periodically.

So does South Korea. At least based on my experience in gaming industry. They also required encrypting all private data.

And Europe. I guess they're all commies.

Our new data protection laws won't kick in till 2018. I expect the NYT will then write a large article about how undemocratic the EU is after companies get fined for disobeying (this is assuming they don't manage to work around it with a new privacy shield that somehow makes it okay to store the data on US servers and rendering the whole protection meaningless).

"Linkedin refused to follow the law and got what was coming. "

Then why does the law only apply to LinkedIn as opposed to the other 100K apps and services that store data in the US as opposed to Russia?

I don't doubt the impetus of this law in a certain light, at the same time, there's some political games being played I think.

There is a famous saying "Strict laws in Russia are compensated by optionality of their application".

Nobody really knows. Presumably they just wanted to test it out on some big enough company (even though LinkedIn is anything but big in Russia). What's more weird is that LinkedIn just outright refused to comply, when all they had to do was issue an announcement and maybe rent some servers in Russia (don't even have to use them).

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