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More and more companies have come about to adopt the ‘bring your own device’ policy, given the sheer variety of smartphones that the employees can choose from. However, this policy comes with a number of limitations since the use of smartphone has to be restricted in a number of ways to ensure security at the company. So is the case at IBM where iPhone’s Siri is disabled for security reasons.

This has now been revealed by IBM’s Chief Information Officer, Jeanette Horan. Horan said that a number of services on the smartphones are disabled due to security reasons at IBM and iPhone’s Siri is one of such services. IBM is of the view that since Siri communicates to external servers, it may carry user’s instructions, something messages that have been dictated, and store them on a third-party server. And that this information can then be exploited.

It does sound bit too cynic but IBM seems to have a point. Horan sums it up in the following words, “We’re just extraordinarily conservative… It’s the nature of our business.”

As part of the terms to use Siri, Apple does say that the users 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.”

IBM also doesn’t allow its employees to make use of public sharing tools such as iCloud or Dropbox. This, too, is a matter of security concerns for IBM and thus, the employees can’t store files on these cloud offerings.

Source: MIT Technology Review

Courtesy: The Verge

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