Russian court forbade third-party companies to collect data from Vkontakte users

Today it became known that the Ninth Arbitration Court of Appeal partially upheld the lawsuit of the Vkontakte social network against the company Double LLC. The essence of the claim is that the social network is requested to prohibit the use by third parties of users of the resource for commercial purposes. The court granted the request "Vkontakte", but refused to recover a symbolic compensation of 1 ruble, writes "RBC".

The trial regarding the use of information from Vkontakte users began in January 2017. As it turned out, the company “Double” has become without the knowledge of the social network to collect information about users, including name, place of work, study and other information that is open to the users themselves. The company then sold the accumulated data array to various organizations, including banks. Interestingly, the National Credit Bureau is among the recipients of information.

The plaintiff claims that neither the users nor the social network gave permission to extract and collect such information, and even more so for its commercial use. The social network, having learned about the data collection, demanded to stop this practice. According to representatives of the resource, information about users, including the one specified in the profile, is aggregated into a specialized database, the creation of which was spent time and money. Accordingly, Vkontakte considers it its exclusive right to allow or prohibit third parties to extract materials from this database and use them for any purpose.

Representatives of the "Double" reported that the information was collected using proprietary software, and parsed only those data that are publicly available.

The first trial in this case took place in October 2017. Then the court of first instance rejected all the requirements of the social network. “This is a very important decision for the entire Russian Internet. The court supported the policy of freedom of information exchange, ”Kommersant quoted the words of Anton Pushkov, managing partner of the Skolkovo Intellectual Property Center , at that time.

The decision of the court of first instance stated that the social network could not prove that it had spent money solely on creating, collecting or processing the materials that make up the database. According to her own rules of the social network, she does not take part in the formation of the content of personal pages of users. The rules also state that it is the users who own the information that is posted on the personal pages. Only they have the right to set access levels to their personal page.

The court of first instance stated that the software "Double" is not able to process information that is closed by the user. In turn, representatives of “Vkontakte” stated that the court was not able to fully understand the technical side of the issue, therefore an appeal was filed. As a result, it was recognized as legal and the requirements of the social network were satisfied.

After the court session, representatives of Vkontakte stated that the decision of the appellate court protects, first of all, the users of the social network. “Double Data violated the rights of users, using their data without prior consent. For us, it was important to protect people from such actions, because they entrusted the information about themselves to us, without assuming that it would be collected by some third-party service, ”a representative of the VKontakte press service explained.

Last year a similar case was considered in the United States. Then the social network LinkedIn announced that it would prevent third parties from accessing the information of public profiles of their users. The court sided with the plaintiff, the company hiQ Labs, which believed that it has every right to collect data that is in the public domain. In its ruling, the court ordered the defendant, within 24 hours, to remove the technology that prevents third parties from collecting data from open profiles. The plaintiff then stated that public data should be accessible to all, and “innovations on the Internet should not be limited either by legal prohibitions or by the monopoly position of a number of powerful companies in the field of accumulation and use of open data.”

As for the case of Double and Vkontakte, there is a possibility that it is not yet completed - the company Double can file an appeal or re-action at any time.