Covid-19 and Its Implications for Data Protection in Russia

The pandemic of the novel coronavirus infection (“Covid-19”, “coronavirus”) has had a great impact on people’s daily lives. With the unprecedented measures that governments have started to apply during the pandemic, such as regular temperature checks and mandatory use of monitoring apps, much more attention in different countries all over the world is being paid to data protection, especially with regard to health data. A similar situation has been evolving in Russia, where the anti-pandemic measures introduced by governments at different levels have raised a number of data protection concerns.
This article addresses the novel regulations introduced in response to the coronavirus pandemic in Russia and focuses on some legal aspects of processing health data from a data protection perspective. Part I of the article describes the measures, which were taken by the federal government of Russia and the government of Moscow in response to the pandemic and which have an impact on data protection. Part II provides a general overview of the data protection regulation in Russia. Part III focuses on some legal aspects of processing health data, in particular, processing in accordance with labor law or for purposes of epidemic prevention, the concept of free consent and the legal aspect of medical privacy of health information.