The Federal Antimonopoly Service and the Audit Chamber denied on Wednesday that the search engine Google could publish their classified documents in search results.
Earlier in the day it became known in the Russian media that a Google search request, phrased in a certain way, could show documents with classified and restricted access published on two websites – gov.ru and gov.ua.
At least 200 such documents, issued by Russia’s Federal Antimonopoly Service, the Audit Chamber, the Economic Development Ministry and other Russian governmental agencies, are said to be available on the web.
“The search engines did not show our classified data. They can show only public information,” the Russian government’s competition watchdog said.
“The Audit Chamber’s website, ach.gov.ru, has never and will never publish information with limited access,” the Chamber said.
Alla Zabrovskaya, who heads Google Russia’s press service, said even if such documents had been leaked, their owners were to blame.
“If the website’s owner wants to hide some pages or the whole website, it’s easy to do by installing a special locking file to pages with confidential information,” she said.
This is the fourth search engine leak report in Russia in the past ten days. On July 18 it became known that about 8,000 text messages – complete with telephone numbers – were detected by Yandex after being sent from the website of a leading Russian mobile operator.
On Monday search engines detected online shopping pages containing buyers’ personal data. The day after, search engines gave open access to online train tickets and the personal data of passengers.