Media: Illogical law “On personal data” must be amended

Uzbekistan is such a small market for giant internet companies that they can simply abandon this market rather than incur additional costs and headaches. They have nothing to lose.

Let’s look at the issue from another angle. Well, let’s just imagine Facebook has met that requirement. If FB brings its servers to Uzbekistan and says that the information about your citizens is on these servers, how will the Personalization Center check it? It violates the privacy of personal correspondence, doesn’t it?

Or another question: these servers need high-speed Internet, is there such a speed in Uzbekistan? 

Third, in the modern world, restricting a network is not an easy task. Even in Russia, which has been a role model in passing the law, Roskomnadzor has failed to block Telegram. Similarly, on November 3, Telegram programmers were able to quickly remove the “blockade” of Uzkomnazorat.

Proxy services and VPN applications that allow users to bypass barriers can be found anywhere on the Internet. These systems, on the other hand, can spread personal information across the Internet that Uzbek officials want to protect.

We don’t know who is behind the free VPN we use, they often steal the user’s personal information and sell it to anyone they want if they pay for it. Buyers, on the other hand, may not always be goodhearted advertisers.

Considering that thousands of Uzbeks now use VPNs, one thing is clear: civil servants, some government agencies have VPNs on both computers and mobile phones. VPN operators can see which sites they use and the passwords they use to access their accounts.

For example, the second official person in Uzbekistan, Senate Speaker Tanzila Narbayeva, her first deputy Sodiq Safoyev, a number of deputies and government members Jamshid Kuchkarov and Timur Ishmetov, have been using Twitter, which has not been available in Uzbekistan without a VPN for four months.

The task of protecting people’s personal information is not being done in practice anyway, on the contrary, the information is being handed over to strangers.

There is another side to the issue: VPN opens the doors to the darkest and most desolate places in the Internet world. We live in a time when even a 1st grader has a phone in his hand. Young people who use a VPN to access TikTok can have unimpeded access to the websites of banned organizations, portals related to terrorism, pornography, drugs and arms trafficking at any time.

Unfortunately, members of the Oliy Majlis did not raise the above issues when adopting this law. They just raised their hands for approval.

Deputies and senators are sitting in silence even after so much talk, there is no attempt to repeal the article in the law. We probably got the answer to the question on that day: the instruction came from the Cabinet of Ministers...

We are confident that if the head of state comes out tomorrow and proposes to repeal this article, the 250 people in parliament will repeal it in no time. They will even praise the President, saying it was the right initiative.

To sum up, we need an honestly elected, independent and strong parliament.