MOSCOW, November 10 (RAPSI) – The Moscow City Court upheld a lower court’s ruling to block access to LinkedIn which boasts to be the world's largest business network, RAPSI learnt in the court on Thursday.

The ruling is final. Access to LinkedIn will be blocked within 3 days after the company receives the judgment.

Moscow’s Tagansky District Court granted earlier a motion filed by Russia’s communications regulator Roskomnadzor seeking to block access to LinkedIn in Russia.

Roskomnadzor claimed that the social network violated the law on personal data storage.

LinkedIn said that Roskomnadzor had lodged the claim unreasonably. If personal data owners consider that their rights have been violated, they are to turn to court and apply to Roskomnadzor. In this case, the regulator has turned to court advocating for indefinite range of persons, the company’s representative said in court.

The federal law 526-FZ requiring that data operators must store personal data of Russian citizens on servers located within the territory of the Russian Federation became effective on September 1, 2015. The law affects all businesses operating in Russia to the extent that they “collect, record, systematize, accumulate, store, correct (update, change), extract personal data on citizens of the Russian Federation,” and those dealing with clients from Russia. Compliance monitoring is vested with Russia’s Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology, and Mass Media (Roskomnadzor), which would ask a Russian court to block access to sites operating in violation of the law.

LinkedIn is the world's largest professional network with more than 450 million members in over 200 countries and territories, according to its website.