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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.
Water is also wet. Must be a slow news day.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Finally someone recognizes that the "cloud" is a danger to security. It's understandable that IBM would not want Apple being aware of what their employees are working on.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
I hope she doesn't find out what her employees use Google for!
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Post-Ban of Siri
IBM Employee: "Siri?"
Siri:"Yes?"
IBM Employee: "Remind me to file for the patent on the [insert technology here], tomorrow."
Siri: "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."
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.
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.
Before everyone chimes in about how you might as well ban Google and Bing too, I think that there is a valid security concern for using Siri when you consider that many people use it for making appointments. Search history is much easier to obfuscate. I can understand if IBM doesn't want Apple to know who it is having "top secret" meetings with.
Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there. - Will Rogers
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.
IBM invents new things, clearly something Apples never been interested in. Good call.
Sorry, what? When I write an email or text on my Android the entire text gets sent to Google? Even if I decide not to send it? The issue is that, when using Siri, the full recording is sent back to Apple's servers where they perform processing. This could allow them to do spy stuff with what people falsely assumed was privat einformation, since a lot of people don't realise that anything you tell Siri you also tell Apple HQ.
Now, are Apple doing evil with what Siri sends them? Probably not. but when you're the CIO of a billion dollar tech company you probably don't want to base your company's technological future on "it's probably fine".
Be smart, help people!
But... Google's not evil. They said so!
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.
For sending internal messages? I would hope so! If my company has it's own internal, monitored, secured, approved, etc.. email set up, and I go and start doing all my work correspondance from a gmail account, I would assume that they would take issue with that. Likewise, if I started using Siri to dictate emails which were then sent over that corporate network.