Open linkedin to bypass blocking. What happened to Linkedin? Opinions of experts and the reaction of social networks. Your contacts are only those whom you know well

The other day it became known that Roskomnadzor, by decision of the Moscow City Court, still blocked the social network Linkedin. Partnerkin decided to figure out what really happened and what users think about it.

In August of this year, Roskomnadzor applied to the Tagansky District Court of Moscow with a request to block the Linkedin website. The reason for the lawsuit was a violation of the law "On Personal Data", since all data of Russian users is stored outside of Russia. The court granted the plaintiff's request and on November 17 telecom operators blocked the resource.

The team of the social network in an official letter to users stated that "their activities are in accordance with local current legislation, and at the moment they are considering all possible ways to resolve the situation and options for further actions." Those who used the paid services of the platform will be able to receive a refund.

Although Linkedin is not particularly popular in the Russian Federation, this news upset many users and companies. For example, the press service of Sberbank told the RNS agency that blocking LinkedIn would make it difficult for them to recruit:

Blocking LinkedIn will significantly complicate the work. We expect significant difficulties in using LI both on the part of the bank's recruiters and on the part of potential candidates. We think that for a number of specialties, the search for candidates will be extended by 1-3 additional days per vacancy, the workload on recruiters will increase, and the share of using agencies may have to be increased.

Many complain that in Russia there are no good headhunting platforms comparable in terms of convenience to LinkedIn:

The resource has long been Russified and is practically the only such network that enjoys authority and popularity among representatives of the HR community. A site block will no doubt hit the search experience for both recruiting agencies and direct employers.

Mikhail Torchinsky, head of the Moscow office of Executive search at theXecutives, told life.ru.

Nikita Mikheenkov, Development Director at Nimax, wrote on his Facebook page:

In turn, some have a different opinion, Deputy Prime Minister of Russia Olga Golodets believes that the blocking of Linkedin will not affect the Russian labor market in any way. She suggested using the portal of Rostrud - the database of vacancies "Work in Russia":

More than 4 million people were employed through this site last year. This resource is very popular, and it gives very clear and understandable vacancies both by region and by profession. It is very easy to find a job.

Alena Vladimirskaya, founder of the Pruffi recruiting agency, said in an interview for 360tv:

Closing LinkedIn will not lead to anything serious. In Russia, the network has not become significant. LinkedIn has remained somewhat of a niche product. It is convenient to use it if you are looking for a job in the field of top management, IT technologies, innovative business or want to work in large international companies. These companies are indeed very actively recruiting through LinkedIn.

This news also became the occasion for many jokes on social networks:

— Stalingulag (@StalinGulag)

Now the network is actively discussing the blocking in Russia of the American social network LinkedIn, the case of which is being considered right now. Roskomnadzor's claims are quite simple: contrary to the requirements of the law "On Personal Data", the LinkedIn network has not moved its servers to the territory of Russia.

« We twice sent requests to LinkedIn demanding to provide information on the implementation of the law on the localization of databases in Russia, - said the official representative of Roskomnadzor Vadim Ampelonsky. - They ignored these letters. In accordance with the requirements of the law, we applied to the Tagansky District Court of Moscow with a demand to block the LinkedIn website and won the process».

But ignoring the requirements of the law is only part of the claims against LinkedIn. There is evidence that the network collects and transfers personal data of users without their consent. Where does it send? This is a big question, the answer to which can vary from banal and rather harmless marketing campaigns to all sorts of intelligence agencies. It is not worth thinking that the latter are only interested in the owners of secret secret documents from the “FSB vaults”. Today, special services are interested in everything in general, primarily due to the fact that it is now customary to start (and win) wars in the information space, as an example, we can cite most of the recent “color revolutions”: Libya, Egypt, etc.

No wonder the FBI has published an official warning about the extortionate actions of attackers who blackmail users of LinkedIn, MySpace and Tumblr. Users are required to pay a ransom (on average, from 2 to 5 bitcoins) and, in case of refusal, they threaten to publish the data they gained access to after major leaks from the listed social networks.

Would you like to receive one of these messages?

« Unfortunately, your data was stolen in a recent hack and now I have your information. Also, I used your profile to access your social media accounts. Through them I can contact all your friends and relatives».

The spectrum of stolen data can be quite wide: from business correspondence about a possible job change to intimate photos sent in private messages.

« If you do not want me to send this information to your friends and family (and possibly employers), send a bitcoin payment to the address provided».

Imagine how “delighted” your boss will be when he finds out that you are negotiating a move to a competitor.

« If you think that the amount is too high, imagine how much the services of a divorce lawyer will cost you».

There are many options for information that is not subject to distribution.

« We have both good and bad news for you. Let's start with the bad ones: we've prepared a mailing list for the specified addresses, which includes information about your profile and credit card transactions. Now the good news: you can prevent this email from being sent by transferring 2 bitcoins to the address provided».

To understand the scale: in May of this year, a hacker under the pseudonym “Peace” put up for sale for only 5 bitcoins (approximately $ 2,275) 117 million LinkedIn usernames and passwords. The network simply denied its guilt for a very long time, and when it was proven, it agreed to pay compensation to users with a paid subscription.

Yes, you can troll and scold the authorities for blocking familiar resources, technological backwardness of thinking, for trying to get into our seemingly personal affairs. But how often do we realize the danger that the network gives in this case? I think that even experienced users - not always and not completely. After all, you don’t want to wake up one morning to find, for example, some revealing publication in the media dedicated to your modest person? Probably not, and it doesn't matter what you do in the main time. But, according to statistics, in the United States more than 10 million people become victims of identity theft every year.

However, it is unlikely that selling your data will be a pleasure. And she in this social network is already a confirmed fact. In June 2012, experts Yair Amit and Adi Sharabani revealed that the LinkedIn iOS app was copying and transmitting data from the calendar of smartphone owners to the company's servers.

In September, a year later, the company was officially accused of stealing user data for its own needs - mailbox addresses for spamming.

It appears that this behavior has become LinkedIn's official policy. And it is not surprising that representatives of the social network refused to communicate with Roskomnadzor, waking up only when it came to a complete blocking. The argument that they did not know about the new law is simply ridiculous. They knew, but thought that, as usual, it would not be necessary to perform it.

Photo: Robert Galbraith / Reuters

LinkedIn traffic in September this year amounted to 1.4 million people, which is 39% lower than in September 2016 (2.3 million people), before the blocking of the service in Russia. This is evidenced by the data of the Mediascope research company (prepared at the request of RBC; they take into account the number of people who accessed the social network at least once from a desktop, mobile device or mobile application during the specified period, among residents of cities with a population of more than 700 thousand people aged 12- 64 years old).

Providers began blocking LinkedIn in Russia in mid-November last year. The reason was the violation by the company of the law on personal data, according to which the personal data of Russians from September 1, 2015 must be stored and processed on the territory of the country. In August 2016, the Tagansky District Court of Moscow found the LinkedIn social network to have violated the law, against which it filed an appeal. However, on November 10 last year, the Moscow City Court rejected the complaint, and a week later Roskomnadzor sent an order to telecom operators to block LinkedIn in Russia.

Before the blocking, in October 2016, according to Mediascope, LinkedIn had 2.6 million users in Russia, in November - 2.5 million. However, in December, the resource's traffic decreased to 1.5 million people.

Similar statistics were provided by SimilarWeb to RBC. In October 2016, the number of unique LinkedIn users in Russia was 3.5 million people (desktop and mobile version in total). In November last year, this figure fell to 2.8 million, and in December - already to 1 million people. According to the results of October this year, the audience of the social network in Russia remained at the same level - the same 1 million users, according to SimilarWeb data.

In May 2017, at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, the head of Roskomnadzor Alexander Zharov, that the topic of resuming LinkedIn work in Russia could be raised in the fall. According to him, by this time Microsoft's acquisition of LinkedIn will be finalized and then "Microsoft will consider what it will do with LinkedIn." Then Zharov that LinkedIn's official position at present is that the company is unable to comply with Russian laws.

The Russian representative office of Microsoft declined to comment on the topic of blocking LinkedIn. “To date, LinkedIn has not contacted Roskomnadzor on the issue of resuming the dialogue,” the representative of the department noted in turn. At the time of writing, LinkedIn has not responded to RBC's questions.

Block non-blockable

The audience in Russia is kept not only by LinkedIn, but also by other blocked resources, for example, the popular torrent tracker RuTracker.org. Access to it in Russia was forever limited back in January 2016. As previously reported by RBC, according to SimilarWeb, a year later, in December 2016, the site recorded about 29.9 million visits from Russia compared to 52.9 million in December 2015. Over the past year, RutRacker's traffic has hovered around 38.8-29.9 million users.

Just like the neighbors

Similar statistics are observed in Ukraine, where on May 16, 2017, by decree of the President of the country, Petro Poroshenko, the activities of Russian companies were banned, including the Mail.Ru Group holding (with all its services, including the social networks VKontakte and Odnoklassniki) and Yandex ". Despite this, six months after the blocking of VKontakte, one of the most visited resources in the country. In the top of the most popular sites in October 2017, the Russian social network retains tenth place in terms of the number of unique users (in April, before blocking, it was second). It is ahead of Mail.Ru with the eighth place (earlier - the fourth) and Facebook with the fourth (in April - the eighth).

Irina Levova, director of strategic projects at the Internet Research Institute, told RBC that the statistics for the first half of the year show that it is impossible to completely block resources on the Internet. “As all experts predicted, people will continue to use their usual services using VPNs and other tools that allow you to easily bypass blocking,” she noted.

However, the Russian authorities hope that the situation can be corrected with the help of new legislation. On November 1, a law began to operate in Russia that regulates anonymizers, VPNs and other services that allow access to blocked sites. Now, if they do not independently block sites banned in Russia, they themselves will be blacklisted.

Like RBC Zharov, most VPN services have agreed to comply with the requirements of Roskomnadzor. “In Russia, there are 25-30 proxy and VPN services that are popular with the population. Among them are cameleo.ru, 2ip.ru, and others. They all expressed their readiness to comply with the law, and we did not have any misunderstanding in our conversation with them. It is clear that there are still hundreds of thousands of small and handicraft VPNs - in principle, it is not difficult to make such a service. But the law is focused primarily on the most popular services among citizens, ”he said, commenting on the law that is coming into force.

However, it is unlikely that even with the new legislation it will be possible to reduce the audience of blocked resources, experts are sure. “A significant number of large VPN services have already reported that they are not going to work with Roskomnadzor, and those users who wanted to have already installed the necessary programs for themselves,” said Karen Kazaryan, chief analyst of the Russian Association for Electronic Communications.

In the case of LinkedIn, the new law will also not work, he continues. “The social network has a certain audience. As a rule, these are professionals who are tied to international companies. It seems to me that nothing will change much, and with new discussions, traffic will even increase, as more people learn about the existence of VPN services, ”he summed up.

Why is LinkedIn not working, you ask. It's simple, our government has blocked access to the site.
Let's see what both sides say and try to find a middle ground.

LinkedIn was blocked by Roskomnadzor by a court decision.

What they say in Roskomnadzor

They have had at least one major data security scandal every year since 2010. Of course, we cannot ignore this. We sent them one request, the second. Both remained essentially unanswered.

-Vadim Ampelonsky, press secretary of Roskomnadzor

It is understood that Roskomnadzor cannot stand aside and wants to prevent such impudence, it is impossible, they say, to dispose of the bases so carelessly.

And under the sauce of the battle for the truth, Roskomnadzor proposes to move the servers to Russia. What for? And then, what will be better for them here.

What LinkedIn representatives are saying

A few days later, a letter arrives in the mail, stating the reason for the blocking.

It also talks about compensation for users with a paid account.

Here is an excerpt:

As you may already know, the authorities of the Russian Federation have decided to block access to LinkedIn due to the fact that we do not store your personal data and the data of our other Russian members in Russia.

Outcome: until Big Brother can process your data, LinkedIn will not work :-)

"War cannot be avoided, it can only be delayed - to the advantage of your opponent" Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527).

Small disposition:

According to Alexa, LinkedIn is one of the top 20 most popular websites in the world.

In June 2016, LinkedIn Corporation was bought by Microsoft Corporation for $26.2 billion.

The core team remained to manage and develop LinkedIn.

As a result of the published joint plans, LinkedIn is expected to be deeply integrated with other Microsoft products, primarily related to business, and become an even more powerful ecosystem for the business world, which has no analogues yet.

As soon as rumors began to appear about a possible blocking of Linkedin, they began to write to me and ask: what to do, how it will affect the work and where the data will go.

You need to understand correctly that blocking involves closing access in Russia at the level of providers, and nothing will happen to the data itself. The account remains as it was. Hence the joke that Linkedin will be blocked, and spam from it will remain. For some users, the application continued to work normally even after the blocking.

The blocking itself can be bypassed, for example, using anonymizers, as well as using a VPN, for example, in the Opera browser. To do this, you need to download the latest version of the browser (VPN is built into it), then in the settings, check the box next to the word VPN in the "security" section.

For more advanced users, the Tor browser can be used, but for beginners, it may not be safe.

Extensions for Google Chrome are also expected to appear, for example, to bypass the blocking of the rutracker site.

Sales and networking through Linkedin

I expect that some Russian companies and LinkedIn users in Russia will stop using the service due to the fact that they either do not know how to bypass the blocking, or do not want to spend time and effort on solving this problem. Before that, the social network was not as popular in Russian companies as, for example, in the USA, Europe, Australia and a number of Asian countries. And now, due to the blocking, there will be even fewer Linked users.

On the one hand, this increases the value of employees who continue to use LinkedIn despite the blocking. What the Vedomosti newspaper wrote about, for example, such a phrase “A new sign of a good specialist has already appeared - how often he updates his LinkedIn profile after blocking”, in fact, really determines the temperament of candidates, especially in the IT field. After all, bypassing the blocking is easy.

At the same time, if we are talking about selling services to foreign partners in Russia and the CIS, about networking and selling services, for example, then using LinkedIn will become even more valuable and will bring more income to those who continue to use it. Also, I assume that the cost of information, as well as the cost of attracting customers, can seriously increase due to the reduction of competition within the country.

A little about the domestic economy

The Titanic is sinking - this is a fact - and it is not yet clear how much more it will sink and when it will reach the bottom. It is not clear how likely it is that it will not sink or be raised, but so far so.

With the overall local economy shrinking, the LinkedIn block will hit even harder for companies that operate in the field of real business, not connected to the state budget or all kinds of grants. Accordingly, they will need a channel (or rather channels) where they can get orders from the real sector, especially from those countries where money is in abundance (again, the United States, some European countries, China, Singapore and others).

To put it simply, in Russia money is an expensive resource. Many companies (especially small ones) have an acute shortage of them. Due to the blocking of LinkedIn, the ease of obtaining finance, simple loans and attracting investments, including foreign ones, in Russian business has decreased dramatically.

Those who do not stop working on LinkedIn or other similar resources - people, companies, but continue to develop this direction, continue to work and attract companies where there is "cheap money", their value in the vastness of Russian business will increase dramatically, due to greater demand and a decrease in competition. The value of knowing how to work with this tool will be very high. Such specialists, if the blocking is not removed in the near future, will become akin to cool tops from global corporations. And companies using LinkedIn will hold their ground or even rise.

That is, it remains, in fact, to decide whether to adopt Link or not. And if you take it, then choose specialists in this topic, invest in them, choose a strategy of behavior and go ahead, to conquer the world! Well, or at least conquer the Forbes list.

Recently, I wrote a post about a possible blocking, in which I decided to express my opinion about the blocking of LinkedIn to the presidential adviser on the development of the Internet German Klimenko, who was my friend. At first, he left my post on his page, but then apparently he was somehow “pressed” on him and he deleted both the post and himself from my contact list. This is approximately how the dialogue between entrepreneurs, experts and government officials is taking place now.

Apparently, the guys do not quite understand what LinkedIn is, what kind of resource it is, and how much such blocking hits the prestige of Russia. Perhaps they also do not understand that both Russians and Russian companies have spent a lot of money on promoting personal and corporate accounts, again, to bring our Russian business to the international level, and with access to international financial instruments.

And the reason is that LinkedIn does not comply with the requirements of Russian law to store users' personal data in Russia. Although, both Facebook and Twitter also ignored this requirement. There is clearly a dual approach.

I believe that German Klimenko and, in general, experts on the development of the Internet in Russia could understand the issue and prove that this will negatively affect many areas of business and (I’m not afraid to say a loud word) the entire Russian economy.

Also, strangely, the active participation of Olga Golodets, Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation, and her persistent promotion of the Rostrud portal. She recommended that everyone dissatisfied with LinkedIn blocking look for work through the Jobs in Russia job database. Meanwhile, although LinkedIn helps to find a job, but this is only 10% of its capabilities. After all, LinkedIn is not a labor exchange.

LinkedIn is an international network that can hardly be replaced by a local social network or job exchange. It's like withdrawing from international relations and working only with rubles. Such a kind of "iron curtain". But then let's give up, for example, Apple and Microsoft products, and replace them with what?! Weak? And from foreign cars?!

It may sound naive, but it is foolish to refuse quality products without worthy analogues.

Of course, many in our country depend on state money and budgets, tenders, and free enterprise is becoming less and less, only the most nimble survive. So they are also trying to knock out one of the most effective ways to get and attract live customers and money for a free business.

Therefore, I recommend that specialists use blocking bypass with full moral justification. And companies that want to receive large international contracts should hire experts, agencies and continue to enjoy the benefits of the LinkedIn network.

Founder of smart solutions agency S4, evangelist of networking and business network LinkedIn