FSB Pushes for Continuous Surveillance of Yandexs Smart Home Technology

Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) has insisted that the tech company Yandex grant continuous access to its smart home system and voice assistant, Alisa, as reported by independent media on Thursday, referencing court documents.

In June, a Moscow arbitration court imposed a fine of 10,000 rubles (approximately $1,200) on Yandex for not complying with this demand. According to rights lawyers interviewed by the investigative platform Agentstvo, this marks an unprecedented instance of the FSB seeking access to Alisa, which resembles Amazon’s Alexa.

Experts indicate that this case illustrates how law enforcement is interpreting Russia’s anti-terrorism laws expansively, which require telecommunications and internet firms to store user communications and surrender them to security services upon receiving a court order.

The business publication Vedomosti noted that Yandex did not have a representative present at the June hearing, where the court found the company guilty of not adhering to FSB’s request. An information security expert mentioned that it might be more economical for companies to pay relatively minor fines rather than disclose user data to state authorities, a process reported to be quite expensive.

The same Moscow court had previously fined Yandex similar amounts for denying FSB access to its geolocation services, private messages, and other data, as reported by the Telegram news channel Telecom Review.

Yandex has not released any public statements regarding the cases mentioned. The company’s developers assert that Alisa only sends voice data to the cloud when activated by users saying «Yandex» or «Alisa.»