The Finnish government does not plan to limit the operations of the Russia-based Yango taxi service in Finland, according to the Minister of Transport and Communications Lulu Ranne (Finns).
The minister issued the statement in response to a question about the matter from opposition MP Jouni Ovaska (Cen), chair of the transport and communications parliamentary committee.
At the beginning of last month, Finland’s Data Protection Ombudsman temporarily ordered Yango — which is owned by Russian tech giant Yandex — to stop the transfer and processing of personal data of customer data from Finland to Russia.
That temporary order went into effect this week and is scheduled to expire at the end of November, the Ombudsman’s office has previously stated.
Data collected by Yango’s taxi app can include details such as a customer’s location information and the address details of taxi rides.
According to an assessment of the situation by Traficom, the Finnish Transport and Communications Agency, Yango’s transfer of data does not pose an actual information security threat.
Traficom noted that the EU’s data protection regulations, GDPR, can help protect people’s information.
Those regulations enable customers who have used the Yango service to ask the taxi company to delete their personal information, including email addresses and data about cab rides they have taken.
The agency posted a guide about removing personal data from Yango servers in particular (in Finnish).
Source: Yle
