State Duma deputy from United Russia Ilya Kostunov proposed limiting the use of mobile devices by civil servants in the interests of national security, the Izvestia newspaper reports.

Officials can use smartphones and tablets for personal purposes, but due to the risk of leaks, the transmission of information that is of “official value” through these devices should be prohibited, Kostunov believes.

The deputy lists smartphones and tablets based on Android and iOS as potentially dangerous devices. Kostunov points out that these devices have not passed “special certification” and may contain “ bookmarks ” that allow the manufacturer to view the user’s personal data.

The politician believes that data such as the list of contacts of a civil servant and his work correspondence may be of interest to third parties.

Kostunov intends to submit a bill to limit the use of mobile devices by officials to the State Duma after the winter holidays. The deputy also urges colleagues to conduct work correspondence through state email, and not through Gmail, Yandex.Mail and other services.

Statements about the presence of undocumented functionality in mobile devices have been made before. Thus, the CEO of InfoWatch Natalya Kasperskaya said in a September interview with Cnews that the devices have “built-in software” for spying on users through built-in cameras.

Kasperskaya in an interview referred to “research” that she was able to familiarize herself with, but information about such capabilities of the iPhone and iPad was not published in the public domain.

In the spring of 2011, smartphones and tablets running iOS really found themselves at the center of a “spying” scandal: then it turned out that they collect and store data about the user’s movements. In response to the accusations , Apple said that saving location data speeds up the device's connection to wireless networks, but allowed users to disable the function if they wished.

Deputy Kostunov saw smartphones as a threat to national security