Siri is one of the most popular and most used programs for recognizing voice commands and employees of many companies use it daily. Because Siri works with the help of Apple's servers, those from IBM are afraid that confidential information spoken by their own employees could end up in the Cupertino company's servers, so they decided to block the ability to use Siri with your own Wi-Fi networks. However, if employees use Siri with a data connection, then no one can stop them from sending the same information to Apple's servers.
Horan isn't only trying to educate IBM workers about computer security. She's also enforcing better security. Before an employee's own device can be used to access IBM networks, the IT department configures it so that its memory can be erased remotely if it is lost or stolen. The IT crew also disables public file-transfer programs like Apple's iCloud; instead, employees use an IBM-hosted version called MyMobileHub. IBM even turns off Siri, the voice-activated personal assistant, on employees' iPhones. The company worries that the spoken queries might be stored somewhere.
"We're just extraordinarily conservative," Horan says. "It's the nature of our business."
IBM bans the use of the Siri assistant on its own Internet networks, but does it have a reason to do so? Well, it seems he has reasons because the personal assistant in the iPhone 4S sends everything we say to Apple's servers, those servers store the information and send it back to Siri who displays other information. The problem is that Apple doesn't say how much it stores that information and doesn't say what it does with it as long as it keeps it on the servers, so IBM's fears have a real reason, and it's because some employees probably dictate emails in which they send information that it should not reach anyone's eyes.
In conclusion, IBM is taking the first big step towards banning this kind of software, but we are talking about a ban that can be overridden at any time.
UPDATE: It seems that iCloud and Dropbox were also blocked by IBM, so the company does not discriminate and blocks the most popular services that offer employees the possibility to share information online.
