The data collected on Moscow-based employees who have shifted to remote work will be anonymised and used solely to assess passenger traffic, according to TASS.
In accordance with Mayor Sergei Sobyanin’s decree, employers must provide weekly information about remote-working employees starting from October 12.
Previously, employers were required to transition at least 30% of their workers to remote work.
Among the data they must provide are employees’ phone numbers, vehicle registration numbers, and social security cards.
“Collecting this information is not aimed at tracking the movement or the specific location of an employee,” emphasized Ivanov.
Many human rights advocates call the requirements illegal and say that they are fraught with abuse of power.
Earlier, Artem Kozlyuk, head of the public organisation “Roskomsvoboda,” stated that the pandemic gave a boost to the development of surveillance technologies.
For a look at how governments deploy citizen-tracking tools in Russia and around the world amid the coronavirus, read ForkLog’s exclusive.
Security before freedom? How governments are introducing mass surveillance tools under the pretext of the coronavirus
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