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Worried About Information Leaks, IBM Bans Siri
squiggleslash writes "CNN reports that IBM CEO Jeanette Horan has banned Siri, the iPhone voice recognition system. Why? According to Horan '(IBM) worries that the spoken queries might be stored somewhere.' Siri's backend is a set of Apple-owned servers in North Carolina, and all spoken queries are sent to those servers to be converted to text, parsed, and interpreted. While Siri wouldn't work unless that processing was done, the centralization and cloud based nature of Siri makes it an obvious security hole."
Jeanette Horan is the CIO, not the CEO.
For one, Siri can be used to write e-mails or text messages. So, in theory, Apple could be storing confidential IBM messages.
So it's stuff like this, that wouldn't be sent through Google or Bing, that she is concerned about. That actually makes a teensy, tiny grain of sense for a change...
Free Pie! The Pie is Also Evil!
Or maybe the fact that Apple knows WHO is doing the queries, and also that Siri collects a bunch of other stuff like names from your address book and 'other unspecified user data' makes it MUCH less secure.
They probably are, but not to the same extent.
Siri differs in two crucial respects:
1. Bing and Google don't, by default, tie searches to an individual. (Yes, I know, they can, you can log in, and sometimes are already, but you can use both services with cookies turned off without problems.)
2. Siri searches your personal information. At least, that's what I figure from the ads. If Samuel L. Motherfucking Jackson can cancel his golf game by telling Siri to cancel it, then clearly Siri knows SLMFJ's schedule, amongst other things. Google and Bing, unless your business uses Office 365 or Google Apps (in which case...), only has limited personal information on you.
I'm not arguing they're not potential security holes, but they're not in the same ballpark as Siri. If you're talking to Siri all the time, in order to modify your work schedules, send emails, etc, then, well, you are passing much, much, more information to Apple.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Watson did NOT have speech recognition for the Jeopardy game (although it gave it's answers as speech). Watson has nothing to do with speech recognition at all.