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Worried About Information Leaks, IBM Bans Siri

Posted by timothy on from the dave-what-are-you-doing dept.

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."

3 of 168 comments (clear)

  1. How is that different from any search engine? by Karmashock · · Score: 2, Interesting

    By this logic google, bing, etc would be security holes.

    And given that IBM is marketing Watson which is basically a super computer version of Siri... how does any of this make any sense?

    I honestly don't understand the worry here.

    When I looked at this, I thought the initial worry might be that the phone was listening all the time and could be parsing real time conversations through the apple servers all the time. That is TECHNICALLY possible. My understanding of siri is that it only listens when you cue it.

    I'm just tying to piece together what situation or insight lead IBM to have this worry? Possibly someone pocket dialed Siri, a sensitive conversation fed into siri, and siri responded to the conversation in context from someone's pocket? That would be spooky. But I don't really see it as a security hole especially since it's hard to pocket dial iphones. The slider tends to make that rare.

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    1. Re:How is that different from any search engine? by gweilo8888 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      When you type a query into a search engine, it's fairly unlikely that somebody else's unrelated typed conversation will also be recorded and transmitted along with it. That's quite possible when using an audio-based search on a device with a sensitive microphone. Likewise as you note, it's unlikely that you'll accidentally type a conversation with your phone in your pocket, but pretty feasible that you'll accidentally record your own conversation.

  2. Siri is NOT banned by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This is factually incorrect.

    IBM enforces a profile on iOS devices that requires an 8-character password with a 15 minute lock timeout, along with the Lotus Traveller package for push email, calendar and contacts.

    Siri is not permitted unless the phone is unlocked, and is therefore unavailable from the lock screen.

    It's THAT simple. Really.