Yandex N.V.
Headquartered in Russia, Yandex provides the country’s leading search engine, alongside email, cloud storage, and maps. Yandex Search held 45.66% of the search engine market share in Russia in early 2022, with Google capturing just over 51%. Advertising is the main driver of Yandex’s revenues.
In spite of its lackluster performance overall, and an increasingly challenging political and regulatory landscape, Yandex saw more improvements this year than any other platform we evaluated. This is owed in part to the fact that the company started publishing transparency reports regularly in 2020. While this marks a step in the right direction, the reports do not include data on the volume and nature of government demands to censor content. Access to such data is important in Russia, where companies have been operating in an increasingly hostile legal and political environment.
In March 2021, Yandex was accused of setting its recommendation algorithm to remove news that mentioned anti-government protests in the country. After Russia passed a law requiring that media outlets receiving foreign funding be publicly labeled as “foreign agents” (a tactic intended to isolate such media outlets and alienate their readers), Yandex began adding a “foreign agent” label to search results that linked to media outlets carrying the “foreign agent” designation, despite there being no clear legal requirement for search engines to display this information.
Just days after Russian military attacks on Ukraine began in February 2022, Yandex displayed a message under its search bar that read: "Some material on the internet may contain inaccurate information. Please be attentive." Independent media experts interpreted this as a sign that Yandex was bowing to pressure from Russian authorities in light of the new law barring “fake news” about the war in Ukraine and mandating it be referred to using only state-sanctioned terms such as “special military operation.” In March the company’s (now former) deputy CEO and board member Tigran Khudaverdyan stepped down after being added to the EU’s sanctions list targeting top executives of companies, like Yandex, that enable Russian propaganda. At the same time, the former head of Yandex, Lev Gershenzon, claimed in an open letter that the company was hiding information about the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
While the company fell short on transparency around users' rights to freedom of expression and information, it published some new information describing how it responds to government demands for user data. The company also noted that there are “legal barriers” to publishing information about such demands, but did not explain precisely what the relevant laws prohibit.
The 2022 Big Tech Scorecard covers policies that were active on November 1, 2021. Policies that came into effect after November 1, 2021, were not evaluated for this ranking.
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.
Yandex improved in the governance category on privacy and AI issues (G1, G2, G3). The company published a set of AI principles pledging to develop “ethical” AI systems, but these represent a weaker standard than human rights commitments, as they are not grounded in any form of international law. Yandex failed to provide critical information about how it oversees issues affecting users’ freedom of expression. Yandex disclosed that it conducts data protection impact assessments, but these processes do not appear to cover issues beyond data protection (G4a). As in 2020, we found no evidence that the company assesses possible privacy, freedom of expression, or discrimination risks that could result from its own policy enforcement; its targeted advertising policies and practices; or its development and deployment of algorithms (G4b–d).
Lacking transparency about its policies and practices affecting users’ freedom of expression and information, Yandex ranked seventh in this category. Yandex provided more information than it had in our previous evaluations regarding how it notifies users about content restrictions (F8). It also published some data about the number of ads it restricted based on its own rules (F4c), but it failed to share any data about the nature and volume of content it restricted as a result of government demands (F5a) or the enforcement of its own content rules (F4a,b).
Yandex performed relatively well on security issues (P13–P18) and made significant improvements in how it handles government demands to access user information by providing legal explanations and relevant data in its transparency report (P10–P12). Yet it failed to provide basic information on how it handles user data, including how and what data it collects about users through technical and non-technical means (P9) and what options users have to control the use of their data for the development of algorithmic systems (P7).