14 DAY TRIAL // The Consumer Union of Russia has filed a lawsuit against ten Russian online stores which exposed confidential information about their customers online.
The Russian Internet community has been plagued by several high-profile data leaks in the last couple of weeks which involved personal data being indexed by search engines.
First it was reported that the phone numbers and text messages of MegaFon could be found on Yandex, the largest Internet search engine in Russia.
A few days later, bloggers also found customer information from EMS Russian Post in the search engine's cache and Internet security firm Informzashchita discovered that over 80 online stores exposed personal data in a similar way.
These data breaches come at a time when the country's data protection legislation has been amended to harden the obligations of companies dealing with personal information.
The Consumer Union of Russia (CUR), an organization with over 100 local chapters around the country, has filed lawsuits against MegaFon and 10 of the 80 stores responsible for the leaks.
"This is all horrible and destructive and not right. We need to do something together to ensure that what we wish to keep private stays private," CUR head Petr Shelishch said during a news conference on Monday, according to the Moscow Times.
Shelishch said that only ten defendants were named in the organization's latest lawsuit because the Federal Consumer Protection Service only provided it with contact information for those companies.
The complaints against MegaFon and the stores don't specify any monetary claims, but are looking to pave the way for future litigation and to show that companies can be held accountable when they fail to protect consumer privacy.
At the moment there is no evidence that the breaches have led to abuse, but it doesn't mean the risks aren't there. For example, the exposed information about purchased train tickets could tell robbers when and what apartments are likely to be empty.