Worried About Information Leaks, IBM Bans Siri

A user 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."

The Cloud is a security hole.

[couchslug]

Water is also wet. Must be a slow news day.

Sooo...

[StefanWiesendanger]

I guess they're about to ban Google and Bing too?

Flaw with the "cloud"

[cpu6502]

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.

Scheduling meetings

[chenjeru]

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.

Re:But make sure to buy our cloud offering!

[DangerFace]

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".

Re:But make sure to buy our cloud offering!

[adonoman]

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.