Yandex

Yandex (Яндекс) https://www.yandex.com/ is a Russian multinational technology company specializing in Internet-related services and products. It is Russia’s biggest technology company. Yandex operates the largest search engine in Russia with about 65% market share in that country. It also develops a number of Internet-based services and products.

 

Yandex provides you with a free e-mail account (Yandex Mail), on-line file storage (Yandex Disk), and the Yandex Browser. The Yandex search engine is the 4th most popular in the world, and provides results that you might not find using other search engines.  Based on the Chromium open source project, the Yandex browser uses the Blink engine and checks downloads through Kaspersky antivirus. Also, the browser uses Opera's Turbo technology to optimize web pages that are using a slow or disrupted connection. Yandex offers DNS spoofing protection, which claims to block malicious web pages and protects passwords and bank card details.

Is Yandex private? Well this is Russia and there is the Система Оперативно-Розыскных Мероприятий ("System for Operative Investigative Activities") which lets the FSB monitor all telephone and Internet communications. So, no Yandex is not private. However, Russia has little interest in the affairs and lives of ordinary Americans, so you may have greater privacy with Yandex than with a US based company such as Google.

So, is Yandex a good option for you? Well, Yandex is a very reliable and easy-to-use service. Yandex is available in both Russian and English. Yandex does not flood you with advertisements every time you conduct a search, so it has a clean interface.  It is, I believe, certainly worth looking at Yandex as an option for your on-line activities.  

 

Depending on your threat model, there may also be some advantage to transferring your web-mail and on-line file storage to Russia. Using Yandex does not keep your account from being monitored, rather it just transfers the ability to monitor your account from your home county (assuming that you are not Russian) to Russia.