VK Co Ltd
Headquartered in Russia, VK provides email, cloud storage, search, and messaging apps, along with VKontakte, the world’s most popular Russian-language social media platform. As of December 2024, VKontakte's monthly audience in Russia reached 92 million users, surpassing YouTube's 89.6 million Russian users for the first time.
VK fell to last place, alongside Amazon, in this year’s RDR Index, after it discontinued key transparency disclosures and failed to address critical privacy and security concerns. Overall, the company saw notable shifts in its transparency and policy disclosures, with both improvements and setbacks. The company expanded disclosure on algorithmic systems, providing clearer insights into how its recommendation systems operate. It also improved transparency around content moderation, publishing detailed data on content restrictions and government takedown requests.
However, these improvements were offset by a decline in transparency on several fronts. It was was one of only three companies with an overall score decline this year. The company’s reporting of key security and privacy policies, including encryption practices and security oversight, was discontinued or became outdated. Transparency around government demands declined as well, as the available reports no longer outlined how requests are handled.
The company took some positive steps in relation to user rights. Namely, Odnoklassniki, VK’s social media platform, introduced a privacy policy change log, as well as limited user notifications about content restrictions. However, the company no longer provided information on whether users are notified about third-party requests for their data.
Security concerns about VK escalated with a major data breach affecting 390 million users, raising serious questions about the company’s ability to protect user data. These concerns were underscored by a history of leaks. Notably, in 2016, 100 million VK accounts were exposed on the dark web. VK also blocked posts from the wives of Russian soldiers calling for their husbands’ return, highlighting the platform’s role in suppressing dissent. Meanwhile, it continued to expand state-backed financial services, reinforcing its close ties with the Russian authorities.
Financial struggles loomed large for the company, with record losses of 24.6 billion rubles in just the first half of 2024, despite increased spending on content and talent acquisition. As VK attempts to position itself as Russia’s answer to YouTube, its new video platform, VK Video, has been accused of pirating content and amplifying pro-war narratives. This year’s findings reflect VK’s deepening censorship, security failures, and growing alignment with state interests.
The 2025 RDR Index: Big Tech Edition covers policies that were active on August 1, 2024. Policies that came into effect after August 1, 2024, were not evaluated for this benchmark.
Scores reflect the average score across the services we evaluated, with each service weighted equally.
We rank companies on their governance, and on their policies and practices affecting freedom of expression and privacy.
VK’s governance transparency declined, primarily due to a drop in transparency regarding internal privacy training (G3) and content moderation appeals (G6b). Notably, the company’s 2024 policy documents failed to offer clear information on employee privacy training. Transparency on its process for content moderation appeals also declined, with the updated Terms of Service now including overly complex language and reducing accessibility for users.
VK made some progress in the area of freedom of expression, particularly by improving transparency on its content moderation practices (F4a). The company disclosed specific data on restricted content. However, lack of clarity about its process for responding to government content restriction demands (F5a) and lack of clear user notifications concerning restricted content (F8) hindered its overall performance in this category.
VK’s privacy performance deteriorated as the company failed to maintain transparency in several key areas. Its removal of disclosures related to encryption (P16) and security oversight (P13) contributed to this decline. However, its social media platform Odnoklassniki began publishing a change log for its privacy policy (P2a) and updating the rules for data sharing across its ecosystem (P5). Despite these improvements, Odnoklassniki’s overall privacy score suffered due to its lack of disclosure on government demands for user information (P10a).