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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. Re:But make sure to buy our cloud offering! by binarylarry · · Score: 5, Funny

    I hope she doesn't find out what her employees use Google for!

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  2. Re:But make sure to buy our cloud offering! by cygnwolf · · Score: 5, Informative
    Ok, replying to myself because I shot my mouth off without reading TFA....

    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...

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  3. Scheduling meetings by chenjeru · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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