Russian Government Wants Twitter Users Data To Remain In The Country
Twitter might have to change its policies by the order of the Russian Govt. who ordered its locals data to remain in the country.
The micro blogging giant, Twitter, has just received an order from the Russian government on Wednesday, who is concerned about its local’s personal data going elsewhere. It asked the company whether it keeps Russian users data within Russia, as it asked the same from another media giant before, Facebook.
This mean Twitter Inc. is going to have to change its policies just for Russia, which is going to be challenge for it. The Eastern European country’s regulator, Roskomnadzor, brought this order. Data body’s chief named Alexander Zharov told informed the public about the company’s recent decision of changing the policy and asking users for their personal data now in order to identify them, which is a breach of privacy, previously this was not the case. He believes that the media company did not store personal data. Now that it started doing so, the government has asked the firm the same demands that it asked of Facebook so that it can protect its citizen’s personal identities from other countries.
In order to meet this demand, the government of Russia has asked both the social media networks to build separate offices that handle data within the country, which is going to increase their expenditures but this is not much problem because both the media giants are quite successful.
The lag of Russia in ad business could lead to loss for Twitter in the future because it will not be able to attain as much profit from the region yet it has to create a separate office and change its policies, go through the hassle to meet the demands of the government. This also shows the level of concern that the citizens and government have for their privacy, but other countries are also becoming aware of this and are taking the same actions if not to this extent, to protect their data.
Media companies in the future will have to make changes in their policies eventually and either stand up or defend themselves, especially in Europe. The social media service functions of data centers, if taken away from it, will face a certain defeat in its business and moving data around the world.
The media network has been facing issues in user growth for long now and is not being able to make the expected profit it should from the customers. The CEO, Jack Dorsey is making the news for working on this problem and adding new features to the service every month or so, so that it can boost user growth and keep the already on the network users entertained. Now it faces another problem of data centers from a country’s government.
Twitter stock closed at $26.13 on November 12.