Well now, it appears if you happen to work for IBM and own an iPhone, don’t expect to be able to use the Siri voice assistant on your iOS smartphone when at work, because the word is IBM has now banned the use of Siri on their internal networks.
According to the guys over at Wired, the reason IBM has taken to banning Siri from their networks is because the iPhone 4S voice assistant sends everything that is said to it back to a large data centre in Maiden, North Carolina.
Apparently Jeanette Horan, the CIO of IBM spoke to Technology Review, stating that the company this week has banned Siri outright because IBM worries that the spoken queries with Siri might be stored somewhere. But it isn’t just Siri that IBM has put a block on as the company has also banned such apps as public file transfer service Dropbox.
According to Wired, Horan is right to worry about Siri, as Apple’s iPhone Software License Agreement states that when a user uses Siri or dictation, what you say is recorded and sent to Apple to convert what you say into text, and apparently Apple also says that Siri also collects unspecified user data and names in a users address book to help Siri perform better.
However apparently when it comes to just how long Apple stores stuff acquired by Siri, Apple doesn’t say, so they could keep the information indefinitely. Whilst a couple of months ago, because some of the data collected by Siri can be of a personal nature, a warning was put out over Siri by the American Civil Liberties Union.
So there you have it, if you do work for IBM and own an iPhone don’t go expecting to be able to use Siri when at work, which one has to say, IBM does have the right to ban if they so wish.
