IBM bans Siri, worried about possible data theft

You cannot use Siri at office anymore, if you work form IBM. Why? Well for starters, the voice controlled personal assistant ships all the data communicated with her to a gigantic data center in Maiden, North Carolina. So if you talk dirty to Siri, it’s all stored. Kind of scary, isn’t it?

But IBM is worried for a different reason altogether. IBM CIO Jeanette Horan told MIT’s Technology Review “The company worries that the spoken queries might be stored somewhere.”

Wired reports that “When you use Siri or Dictation, the things you say will be recorded and sent to Apple in order to convert what you say into text.” When users communicate with Siri a lot of sensitive information such as contact details, emails, messages, so on and so forth are sent to the Apple servers.

The agreement that we all rush to hit agree states, “By using Siri or Dictation, you agree and consent to Apple’s and its subsidiaries’ and agents’ transmission, collection, maintenance, processing, and use of this information, including your voice input and User Data, to provide and improve Siri, Dictation, and other Apple products and services.”

If you think about it, Siri does breach the privacy of individuals that use it. For what periods of time is this data stored with Apple and who are the people that have access to it is unknown by the people who use the personal assistant software.