Kazakhstan will conduct unscheduled audits of five Yandex subsidiaries by the end of November to verify their compliance with personal data protection laws, storage regulations, and data localization rules. The inspections were announced by Jaslan Madiyev, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development, as reported by TASS.
The regulatory scrutiny will target Yandex Kazakhstan LLP, Yandex Bastau LLP, Yandex. Taxi Corp LLP, Yandex. Eda Kazakhstan LLP, and Yandex LLP. According to Madiyev, inspectors will examine both the organizational protocols and technical safeguards implemented by the tech group to protect customer information.
If auditors uncover any statutory violations, the ministry will issue formal compliance orders and review administrative penalties against responsible parties.
Madiyev disclosed the planned probes in response to a formal inquiry from member of parliament Lyazzat Zhylkybayeva. She cited severe disruptions across Yandex’s ride-hailing and food delivery platforms in Kazakhstan on October 11, after a drone struck data center infrastructure operated by the company in Vladimir, approximately 180 kilometers from Moscow.
On the day of the outage, Yandex Qazaqstan acknowledged technical failures and reported that engineers were restoring service. The lawmaker, however, demanded an investigation into whether citizens' sensitive personal data had been transmitted abroad and whether mandated security measures were breached.
“The fact that a platform handling citizens’ phone numbers, home addresses, travel routes, and payment details daily can be halted by a single overseas failure requires a transparent, unequivocal explanation of where and under what legal framework this data is processed,” Zhylkybayeva stated in her inquiry.
In December 2023, the Ministry of Digital Development announced that Yandex had brought its servers into Kazakhstan to satisfy domestic data residency mandates.
