15% of Ukrainian drivers involuntarily spy for the aggressor country using Russian mobile navigators

The Russian government receives online information about the situation on Ukrainian roads, the passage of military equipment and even entrances and exits to any house, using information collected and transmitted by thousands of our drivers, reports InformNapalm, referring to the research data of the Public Union Association of Responsible Carriers.

15%, which is one in seven drivers in Ukraine, use Russian navigators 2-GIS and Yandex Maps and Navigator, which are controlled by the government of the aggressor country, and which can still be installed and used through a VPN in Ukraine.

The applications receive and can transmit a lot of information about Ukrainian cities, including critical infrastructure facilities, military movements, or places where people gather. The driver may not even know that he has become a spy – in order to pass on the information, he just needs to drive past these objects with the navigator turned on. According to the Association of Responsible Carriers, the most Russian applications are installed on the phones of drivers in Kharkiv, Odesa or Dnipro. There are 42% to 58% of such users.

The owners of the applications do not hide their Russian roots. From the App Store and Google Play, on the page of the 2-GIS maps and navigator offline application, it was previously known that the developer of the application is the company Urbi Gulf FZ-LLC, registered in the UAE. It is currently unavailable for download only in Ukraine. There are no such restrictions abroad, and in our country they can also be used via VPN. The Privacy Policy, which is freely available, states that personal data is processed by the Cypriot company 2GIS LOCAL SEARCH LIMITED. According to the Association of Responsible Carriers, its main beneficiaries are Russian citizen Aleksandr Sysoyev and the state-owned Sberbank of Russia. In addition, the head office of LLC DublGis, which gives the right to use 2-GIS for free, is located in Novosibirsk, Russia. In June 2020, 72% of the shares of the application developer company were bought by Sberbank, another 3% of its shares belong to O2O Holding LLC, a joint venture of Sberbank and Mail.ru Group. There is even a site https://2gis.ua/kyiv, which collects information about the location of organizations, the height of buildings, and entrances and exits from them.

It is reported that the Association of Carriers repeatedly appealed to the National Security Service of Ukraine, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and the Security Service of Ukraine to block the operation of Russian mobile applications on the territory of Ukraine, but the actions of the relevant structures were limited to letters addressed to mobile application stores.

The source does not specify how the applications collect such information. But it is worth remembering that such a probability still remains. Therefore, it is better not to help the enemy once again and to refuse to use software that is developed and controlled by the aggressor country.