Transparency Report

This page includes the information about how Yandex handles requests from government agencies and the number of requests it receives. It also provides statistics on requests from Yandex users and partners, as well as information about which links and materials are removed from search results or Yandex services and the reasons why it happens.

Government requests for user data

Yandex regularly receives requests from government agencies regarding user data. We only consider those requests that have been submitted in accordance with all formal requirements. All requests are checked carefully to ensure their legitimacy. Yandex only provides the amount of information that is strictly required in order to fulfil the request. Any requests that fail to comply with all relevant procedural and legal requirements are turned down. Yandex does not provide responses to requests that do not comply with such requirements. Such requests are not reflected in the statistics below.

This page contains statistical information about requests for user data received by Yandex. The report does not include statistics about information disclosure under Article 10.1 of Federal Law No. 149-FZ of 27.07.2006. You can read more about our commitment to our users’ privacy here.

Access to personal data

Yandex ensures that the data that belongs to its users is safe and secure. Yandex users can access and manage their data through their personal account Yandex ID. Starting from June 1, 2021, they can export their data from various Yandex services and download it as an archive or delete their data from specific services.

These figures show the number of users’ requests to download or delete their data between January and the end of June 2023. Multiple requests may come from the same user.

Requests to delist content under the “right to be forgotten” law

In this section, you will find information regarding requests to delist search results under Federal Law 264 of 13.07.2015, also known as the “right to be forgotten” law. This law requires search engines to remove links to unlawful, untrue or outdated information about the requester from their search results.

The data below shows the number of URLs requested to be removed from Yandex Search results by category of reason for removal: outdated, untrue or unlawful content, as well as the number and percentage of refusals.

Some URLs may have more than one reason for removal and can be included into more than one category, which means that the sum of the number of URLs in each category does not equal the total number of URLs requested to be removed from our search results.

Only those requests that have been submitted electronically and according to all applicable requirements are reflected in the statistics.

Roskomnadzor requests for content removal

To comply with Russian laws, Yandex is required to remove search results that link to websites included in Roskomnadzor’s register of prohibited websites. Links to such websites are removed automatically as soon as they appear in this register.

A total of 190,525 links have been removed between January and the end of June 2023. Yandex is also legally required to comply with Roskomnadzor’s requests to remove prohibited content from its servers. These requests may concern the content on one of our content-based services, such as Q or Yandex Music, as well as images, Turbo pages, cached copies of web pages or other objects.

Content removals, by service, January-June 2023

Protecting the interests of copyright holders

Yandex supports copyright holders, including by developing solutions that help them effectively combat copyright infringement. In the fall of 2018, Yandex signed the Memorandum of Cooperation for Protecting Exclusive Rights alongside a number of other major IT companies and copyright holders. This Memorandum resulted in creation of a register of links to pages potentially violating the owner’s copyright. Continually updated by copyright holders, this register lets Yandex quickly remove links to these pages from its search results.

Since the signing of the Memorandum, Yandex has removed a total of 95,273,180 links from its search results at the request of copyright holders, while the number of links removed between January and the end of June 2023 reached 18,838,678.