In short: Two fresh July 2026 surveys show that Russians' anxiety about privacy is going mainstream: 45% believe hidden surveillance through mobile apps is likely, and 75% fear their personal data will leak. Yet the same users generously hand apps access to their location, camera and photo gallery. We unpack what is behind the numbers and how to actually cut the risk to your phone and your data.
What happened
In early July 2026 two independent surveys landed on how Russians feel about privacy and leaks. On 5 July the IT firm Edna published a study of 2,790 residents of Russia aged 18–75; on 8 July the telephony service Novofon released a poll of 1,300 residents of major cities. Both point the same way: worry about personal data has become mass-market. How surveillance through a smartphone actually works, and what to do about it, we covered in our guide on protecting your phone from tracking.
According to Edna, 45% of respondents consider hidden data collection or surveillance "quite likely", and 75% openly fear a leak of their personal data. Another 40% worry about losing or forgetting passwords to important services. The Novofon poll adds the lived experience: 25% of Russians (one in four) have already faced a leak of their data, 56% have missed important calls because of spam, and 53% receive calls from companies they never gave their number to.
Why the anxiety is rising — and how users feed it
The paradox is that, while fearing surveillance, users themselves open apps to the most sensitive data. Per Edna, 80% of respondents added apps to their phone over the past year: 38% now run 10–20 programs and 25% run 20–40. And almost every one asks for permissions: 63% grant location access, 55% allow notifications, and 53% give access to the camera and photo gallery. Only 5% deliberately limit what apps can reach.
Each such permission is a channel through which an app — and its advertising partners — collects data about you: where you go, what you photograph, when and how you use your phone. Individually the permissions look harmless, but together they build a detailed digital portrait. How that portrait is assembled through the browser we broke down in our piece on the browser fingerprint.
What it means for your data
The worry is not groundless. Leaks in Russia are not one-off incidents but background noise: analysts estimate that tens of millions of records reached the open web in the first half of 2026, and that counts only public dumps (more in our news item on the drop in leak postings). The danger is not a single row but the combination: a phone number plus a name is raw material for targeted "calls from the bank", while a password plus an email risks automated stuffing across hundreds of sites.
Telling, too, is who Russians blame: 26% point to attackers who breach databases, 22% to companies with weak protection, and another 17% to dishonest employees who sell databases. In other words, people increasingly understand that their data leaks not through their own fault but on the services' side — which sharpens the demand for self-defence.
How to protect your phone and data
Audit your permissions. In your phone settings, revoke access that apps have no real reason to hold: a flashlight does not need your location, and a game does not need your contacts. How access filtering works we explain in our article on app filtering in a VPN.
Install apps only from official stores and do not grant Accessibility rights to programs without a clear reason — that is a favourite lever of malware.
Harden your accounts. A unique password for every service, a password manager and two-factor authentication via an authenticator app stop most post-leak attacks. To check where your email has surfaced, use our guide on checking for a personal-data leak.
Shrink your network footprint. Let us be honest: a VPN will not revoke permissions or remove data from breaches that already happened. But it covers the network half of the problem — it encrypts traffic on untrusted networks so data cannot be intercepted in transit, and hides your real IP from sites and your provider, reducing how much information is collected about you. See how LiMP VPN does it on our features page.
Sources
This report is based on the study by Edna (ptoday.ru, 5 July 2026) and the survey by Novofon (CNews, 8 July 2026).