Authorities believe it is especially important to completely cut off Russians’ access to social networks Facebook and Instagram.
Large VPN services will be blocked in Russia from March 1. This was said by the head of the Safe Internet League, Ekaterina Mizulina, on Monday, February 5, reports The Moscow Times.
According to him, VPNs, which allow you to open sites blocked in Russia, are a “portal to hell.”
“You create a hole in your gadget through which data is transferred to third parties, and thus a lot falls into the hands of scammers and other bad people. From the point of view of your personal safety, the these applications are not available,” said Mizulina at a meeting with students in Yekaterinburg.
At the same time, he admitted that it is impossible to completely block VPNs, proxies, and anonymizers in Russia.
“For a knowledgeable person, there is nothing difficult in creating his own proxy,” said Mizulina.
In October, the deputy chairman of the Council for the Development of the Digital Economy under the Federation Council, Senator Artem Sheikin, warned about the upcoming blocking of VPN applications, the number of downloads of which in Russia is reaching tens of millions.
According to him, in March 2024, an order will come into effect according to which VPN services will be blocked by Roskomnadzor in all markets. According to Sheikin, it is especially important to block Russians’ access to the services of the American company Meta, which owns the social networks Facebook and Instagram.
In Russia, 20% of citizens use a VPN, a survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago showed. According to the calculations of the international research company data.ai, services for bypassing website blocking have become leaders in downloads on Google Play and the App Store: with an overall increase in application downloads in Russia 1%, the VPN services category grew by 3%, up to 160 million downloads.
We remind you that at the end of January there was a large-scale Internet outage in the Russian Federation. Users complained about problems accessing the websites of major banks, marketplaces and other frequently used services.
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Source: korrespondent
I am David Wyatt, a professional writer and journalist for Buna Times. I specialize in the world section of news coverage, where I bring to light stories and issues that affect us globally. As a graduate of Journalism, I have always had the passion to spread knowledge through writing.