The public organization \”Business Russia\” proposed to the government to legislate a rule that would oblige international payment systems to process Russians’ transactions for purchases on foreign sites through Russian gateways. сообщает «Коммерсант»
Full name, delivery address and card number that a user provides when purchasing from a foreign online store are considered personal data, but they are not legally defined as payment data. Equating them to such data, according to the authors of the initiative, would help protect Russians’ bank cards.
According to the calculations of participants of “Business Russia,” companies iTunes, AliExpress, Airbnb and Google process about 30% of online transactions from the total number of payments on Russian cards. Turnover from them has surpassed 300 billion rubles. Introducing a gateway fee at 0.2–0.5% of the payment amount could provide an additional inflow to the Russian budget, they add.
In a comment to ForkLog, the head of the public organization RosKomSvoboda, Artem Kozlyuk, described the idea of “Business Russia” as unfounded and noted that any artificial intermediary creates additional risks, including for transaction privacy.
Along with this, for Russians, the more dangerous is the collection of information about domestic payments, rather than about rare overseas purchases, says independent expert Alexander Isavin.
“All domestic payments are already processed with storage in Russia, and a great deal of information is collected about them. Profiling and violating privacy for regular payments is easier. Those who really need to hide payments abroad from the state can quite easily do so through intermediaries, or by using cryptocurrency,” he explained.
Isavin suggests that the initiative could be aimed at expanding taxation of Western online marketplaces.
“Perhaps one of the reasons for the appearance of this initiative is the desire to simplify the imposition of sanctions on Western companies, for example, to collect fines by Roskomnadzor from Facebook and Twitter,” the expert added.
As noted, in June 2019 a bill was presented to the Russian government that obligated international payment systems to transfer the function of client authentication for online payments to the National Payment Card System.
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