Russian Taxi Snafu Shows CDOs Not Immune to Geopolitics
- By Stefan Hammond
- September 05, 2022
Discussion of “Big Tech” always includes major players like Alphabet, Apple, Google, and Meta. These are the big guns with massive market caps and hefty user bases.
Russia's Yandex seldom gets name-checked. The country's been in the news for all the wrong reasons this year, but Russia's main tech conglomerate rarely hits the headlines.
Until September 2022, when someone called for Yandex.Taxi.
The Russian Google
The Internet-fueled gig economy enjoys regional brand leaders in specific market sectors. Southeast Asian customers might use an umbrella provider like Grab or Gojek for food delivery, grocery shopping, and transport. Other users dial in Uber or Lyft for transport while preferring Grubhub or Doordash for restaurant delivery.
Yandex positions itself as the be-all-and-end-all for such services. The Russian multinational technology company — Yandex LLC (Яндекс) — provides “Internet-related products and services, including an Internet search engine, information services, e-commerce, transportation, maps and navigation, mobile applications, and online advertising,” says Wikipedia.
Yandex's history is rooted in search engine technology. In the early 90s, “[co-founder] Arkady Volozh thought up the word ‘Yandex.’ Arcadia had launched a new version of a search program, and they wanted to give it an original name. [Fellow co-founder] Ilya Segalovich sat down with a sheet of paper and wrote down words that described the essence of the program, brainstorming around the words “search” and “index.”
The result: “Yandex” — an abbreviation for “yet another indexer” because back then, players like Lycos and Alta Vista vied with Google for search engine supremacy (nowadays, Google competes with privacy-centric search engines like DuckDuckGo and Startpage.)
But while Yandex may have started as the “Russian Google,” the company diversified into services both Net-borne and in meatspace. Yandex has been listed on the NASDAQ since 2011 and now “offers internet search and other services like maps, navigator, public transport, taxi, weather, news, music, TV program, translation, online shopping...free email service and cloud storage.”
The company also offers its web browser, but a recent article in Business Insider cast a less-than-positive light on the Yandex browser.
Dodgy browser
“While it may not come as a shock that browsers track users' history, the fact that this data is being stored on companies' servers means it's also subject to be shared with government agencies or third-party commercial partners — and could be disclosed in a data breach,” said Business Insider. And which browsers occupy the bottom rung, according to a study by Douglas Leith of Trinity College Dublin?
Yandex: listed on the NASDAQ since 2011
The study tracked the information-sharing practices of Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, and Microsoft Edge, along with Yandex and open-source Brave. While the latter was lauded for its privacy-centric operations, Microsoft Edge and Yandex were pilloried. "From a privacy perspective, Microsoft Edge and Yandex are much more worrisome than the other browsers studied,” wrote Leith.
However, privacy concerns did not seem to affect Yandex Taxi's business until the taxi snafu in Moscow earlier this month.
Taxi mayhem
“Yandex.Taxi (Russian: Яндекс.Такси) is an international company owned by Russian IT-giant Yandex and that operates taxi aggregation and food tech businesses across Russia, CIS, Eastern Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, according to Wikipedia.
The transport company leverages its tech giant parent: “In 2020, Yandex.Taxi was reportedly developing AI-infused proprietary hardware and software for its vehicles that monitor drivers’ attention levels, as well as a facial recognition system that determines the identity of the person behind the wheel.”
But Yandex's scheme to become an Eastern European rival of Elon Musk's Tesla hit the brakes on September 1, when “hackers meddled with ride-hailing service Yandex Taxi to create a two-hour-long traffic jam in the Russian capital.” “A traffic jam clogged central Moscow on Thursday [September 1] after hackers broke into a popular ridesharing app and ordered dozens of drivers to the same address,” said MSN.
It wasn't a pleasant sight on the streets of the Russian capital. “Reports on Twitter claim that cars were sent to the Kutuzovsky Prospekt, a major avenue in Moscow,” said cybernews.com. “One of the best-known objects in the area is the Stalinist-era building, the ‘Hotel Ukraina’ or Hotel Ukraine.”
While it’s unclear who was responsible for the Yandex Taxi hack, “the Twitter page Anonymous TV claims that the Anonymous collective was behind the breach, which is part of a more extensive hacking campaign against Russia, dubbed ‘OpRussia’,” said cybernews.com. “According to Russia’s cyber policy expert Oleg Shakirov, hackers likely bypassed Yandex’s safety measures, creating multiple fake orders that prompted drivers to simultaneously go to the same location.”
Tech biz = global biz
This entire incident should remind chief digital officers that tech doesn't inhabit a special domain outside of geopolitics. The “Big Tech” label applies globally among some cyberfactions, and given the nature of the business, not all sanctions will be applied unilaterally.
That said, co-founder Arkady Volozh wasn't commiserating at Yandex earlier this month. “Russian internet giant Yandex (YNDX.O) said [in June 2022] that Arkady Volozh had stepped down as CEO and left the board of directors after the European Union included him on its latest list of sanctions against Russian entities and individuals,” said Reuters.
“The European Union (EU)...named Volozh and many others as part of its sixth round of sanctions against Russia,” said The Register. "'As founder and CEO of Yandex, he is supporting, materially or financially, the Government of the Russian Federation and is responsible for supporting actions or policies which undermine or threaten the territorial integrity, sovereignty, and independence of Ukraine,' the EU's listing states.”
Stefan Hammond is a contributing editor to CDOTrends. Best practices, the IoT, payment gateways, robotics and the ongoing battle against cyberpirates pique his interest. You can reach him at [email protected].
Image credit: iStockphoto/Vlad Petin