A top Russian politician, Nikolai Levichev, has written to the country's prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, calling for government departments to be banned from using Windows 10. Levichev is deputy speaker in the State Duma, the lower house of Russia's parliament, and leader of "A Just Russia," the third-largest party there. His letter was prompted by concerns about the privacy statement that appears when carrying out the free upgrade to Windows 10, which lists a range of information that the operating system can gather by default and send to Microsoft. Earlier this month, Ars explored this issue in detail.

Another reason for Levichev's call is that all software used by government agencies has to be certified in Russia, and this has not happened yet for Windows 10. According to the article in Vedomosti (translated), this usually takes six months from the launch of a new product. As well as writing to the Russian prime minister, Levichev also wrote to the head of Roskomnadzor, the Federal Service for Supervision in the Sphere of Telecom, Information Technologies and Mass Communications, asking him to investigate whether Microsoft is in compliance with Russian laws given the way that Windows 10 can gather and transmit personal data.

This is not the first call for Russia to ban Windows 10 in government departments across the country. Two weeks ago, the Russian member of parliament, Vadim Solovyov, asked the country's attorney general to investigate (translated) whether Windows 10 violates Russian privacy laws. He pointed out that at least some of the information gathered by the latest version of the operating system when running on government computers would be classified, and went so far as to call Microsoft's activities "espionage." In response, Microsoft said that data was only gathered with the user's consent, although this month's article in Ars shows that boosting privacy is not simple and may not be possible completely.