All data on taxi rides provided by Yandex in other countries is stored in Russia, Meduza reports, citing its sources.

This was revealed from corporate emails, accessed by Meduza. Yandex personnel would ask their management how they should respond to its customers who asked whether their data was protected.

“All our databases are located in Russia. There is neither physical nor logical separation [between the Russian and the foreign part of the corporation],” the leaked emails read. The customer support personnel were asked to avoid “mentioning any information regarding the current location of the data centres”.

Two Yandex employees told Meduza under the condition of anonymity that all the Yandex taxi app data is being stored in three data centres, located in Russia’s regions of Moscow, Ryazan, and Vladimir, while an additional one is under construction in the Kaluga region.

Some part of the data used to be stored in Finland’s Mäntsälä prior to the Ukraine war, but the Finnish data centre was eventually shut down due to the sanctions. Additionally, all of its data was also sent to Russia’s data centres, Meduza’s sources in the corporation report, so as to maintain uninterrupted service.

Experts Meduza has spoken to believe that the involvement of the FSB puts Russian nationals abroad under threat.

“They have data on taxi services they provide in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Georgia, and other countries Russians moved to after the start of the war,” one of the experts says.

Russia’s government issued a decree on 7 July that obliged all taxi hailing providers to share their internal data with the FSB without a court order. The regulation will come into force starting 1 September.