Yandex

Yandex has scaled up its initiative Helping Hand, launched during COVID-19, to continue supporting people with reduced mobility by offering them free rides through its app and helping non-profits with free access to Yandex digital products. The company is also committed to integrating accessible design principles in its products and has several features in its food delivery and navigation apps to accommodate users with disabilities. Furthermore, it regularly collects feedback from people with disabilities to improve its services, and partners with organisations focused on accessibility.

Through its platform Lyceum, the company provides computer programming training to high school students. Since 2007, the Yandex School of Data Analysis has been providing technical skills training to university and graduate students in the Russian Federation, Belarus, and Israel, aspiring for a career in research and IT. Additionally, the company contributes to school connectivity through a free online service Textbook, which provides teachers with online educational content. The company also follows best practice by reporting participation and financial metrics for some of its programmes.

Yandex discloses responsibility for cybersecurity at a senior level, follows industry norms for monitoring and responding to security incidents as well as makes its information security management certificate public. The company also has a group privacy policy and publishes a transparency report. Yandex offers content control for its products and services, and in 2021, it joined the Alliance for the Protection of Children in the Digital Environment to help create a safer internet environment for children.

Yandex supports open innovation through various open source projects. It also supports the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and uses them to measure its own goals and progress. Furthermore, it discloses the total number of women employed in tech roles at the company. Yandex also has a committee dedicated to ethics and publishes the ethical guidelines it follows for AI.

Yandex has an opportunity to contribute to digital inclusivity of women and girls. It can also disclose the number of people with disabilities it employs and outline the steps it takes to create an inclusive workplace for them. Additionally, the company should report how the economic value it generates is distributed among its stakeholders, as well as the taxes it pays and its employment in the markets where it operates.

Yandex has an opportunity to carry out third-party impact assessments for its digital skills programmes to better understand programme impacts and identify strengths and areas of improvement.

Yandex can strengthen its group privacy policy by going beyond minimum compliance requirements. Further, as a digital company, Yandex should also make a high-level policy commitment to child online safety.

No evidence was found of the company’s activities for supporting the tech innovation ecosystem. Yandex has an opportunity to improve in this area by supporting start-ups.

Yandex commits to respecting all human rights in a publicly available policy statement. The company also commits to respecting the ILO core labour rights and expects its business relationships to do so as well. Moreover, the company has a grievance mechanism accessible to all stakeholders to raise human rights complaints.

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