Apple defends Siri abortion, birth control omissions as unintentional - Page 2

WOW this is lame, people can't be responsible for their own actions....Siri made me do it

Actually, abstinence has a failure rate second only to the rhythm method. Indoctrinated shame around condoms is the primary reason why American teen pregnancy rates are six times higher than in many other developed countries with comprehensive sex education in schools.

That's what I've been wondering. So here's the scenario...

Siri is asked for help locating an abortion clinic. This is not like looking up a number in the phone book. You are asking an artificial intelligence, programmed by Apple, to give you information. Something goes terrible wrong at the clinic supplied by Siri. The clinic gets sued. I'm betting the lawyers would try to sue Apple too. And don't say it would be impossible for such a lawsuit to succeed.

This scenario, of course, could be applied to many other recommendations from Siri. Like asking for an auto repair shop, a medical professional, a lawyer, etc. We are told all the time that the law is always far behind the technology.

I suspect you are confusing abstinence in theory and abstinence in practice.

Actual abstinence is 100% effect - however - preaching abstinence while in fact the exact opposite is occurring is not.

I can't figure out why those opposed to abortion are also opposed to effect prevention - it would seem to me that as a first step at least would be to work toward 100% prevention of every having anyone get to a point where they feel they need to make that decision. and that may include the entire gamut of options from more effective sex ed to options for prophylactic and even sterilization.

I do not buy the argument that effective birth control promotes sexual activity - I think it should be pretty clear to anyone that sex does not need any promotion.

but then I suppose it is far too much to ask to have ideology and politics etc removed from the discussion and take a practical, logical approach to what is effective.

In fact I think that the repressive attitudes about sexuality that prevail are partly responsible for many sex related problems, from unwanted pregnancy, to prostitution, to infidelity.

Wait. Give 'em a chance to tie it to a missing child in the Confederacy. Or whatever is the latest single incident occupying the bulk of news "coverage" - instead of all the other unimportant topics like war, peace, death, medicine, science, technology and proper football scores.

The version of Carrier IQ on iOS is not the root kit version Android has, allows the user to opt out, and isn't logging keystrokes:

http://blog.chpwn.com/post/13572216737

Apparently "open" isn't always better, especially when "open" is just marketing propaganda like with Android, or means "open to all sorts of abuses".

Except that It's not an artificial intelligence, since *real* AIs don't exist outside fiction

Accepting that premise means that, if "real AI" showed up, you wouldn't recognize it, because you are convinced it only exists in fiction.

And if it DID direct people to abortion clinics? You'd have the pro-life "rights groups" and "bloggers" having a fit. Apple should have responded like this:

"We wish we could say we're surprised. But we're not. Let's get this straight: You're complaining about not being to find abortion services on your PHONE!? Did you need an abortion that badly and quickly that you couldn't find a laptop or a phonebook to look up your nearest fetus extraction center? Look folks, we gotta be honest here....you people are all freakin' bananas. Oh, and consider this: Without us you wouldn't even THINK about searching for abortion clinics on your phone. You'd still be using a Moto RAZR with "mobile web", downloading data at a whopping 6 KB a second. So we'd rather you just say thank you, and be on your way. Freaks."

nothin like leveraging Apple's market presence to politicize its services.

That's all I'm going to say on this - it's pathetic really. And to devolve the thread into a political discussion is equally dumb. All form, no substance - no wonder the general public is jaded and cynical about this stuff.

I guess the next thing the scum bags on the left will want to know is where the next OWS camp will be. Probably get an abortion there, too.

Maybe the ACLU can team up with Greenpeace and invade Apple's headquarters.


Exactly. Apple doesn't determine what information is available. Apple can only present info that's in the database.


Absolutely.


I have some theories about that. In fact, I once wrote an essay. My parish priest didn't like it. From the Catholic Church's perspective, the problem is that they're using consistent theology, but basing it on 12th century science. The church is still acting on the basis of the sperm being a seed and the womb being merely a receptacle. On that basis, they believe that stopping or killing the sperm is the same as killing a fetus. What they don't realize is that, biologically, stopping sperm is no different than trimming your fingernails.

Note that I said 'consistent' theology. I believe it's erroneous, but it would take considerably longer to prove that. The point is that their position is 100% consistent with their theological position and 12th century science. They could maintain the same theological position and allow birth control (at least barrier methods, anyway) if they simply update their science advisors.

For the other people opposed to birth control (religious fundamentalists and right wing radicals), it seems to come down to a misguided belief that you can order people (especially kids) to do what you want them to do and that they will always obey if you make your order forceful enough. Clearly, this doesn't work.

It's a good thing this came out. This way, it makes Apple more or less neutral so they won't piss off any customers.

This whole thing is STUPID!!!

Obviously, the people jumping on the bandwagon and posting ridiculous comments do not have an iPhone 4S. All you have to do is ask Siri where you can get an abortion as I did when I first saw the story. It pulled up a map to the nearest abortion clinic. DONE! That is likely what happens 99% of the time. Tell Siri you want a hamburger and see how many false hits you get. No story, there.

This just shows how disruptive Siri is to a lot of companies that they would stoop so low and search so hard for something, anything to use against this technology. These are people who just want to create negative headlines. Truth, be damned! Siri is a threat to Google, 411, and any number of entities. I bet a little investigative reporting would reveal the competitor's finger prints on this latest non-scandal.

if Siri did tell everyone where the abortion places were.....maybe you would not be here to read this!

it has to be mentioned that abstinence (which you are somewhat heavily promoting here), is actually the worst and least reliable method of birth control.

There are literally thousands of studies showing how promoting abstinence as a cure for unwanted pregnancy not only regularly fails, but actually increases the likelihood of unwanted pregnancies.

People like sex. They always have. It's a biological urge/need.

Advising them to just "not do it" is possibly the worst most doomed-to-failure kind of advice you could give anyone contemplating these issues. Even if they manage to avoid penis/vagina penetration, the average person will still masturbate every couple of days or so at least so they are still "having sex" even if they are church going Christians living alone.

It's like asking people not to fart.

Unintentional? I don't think so.

http://amaditalks.tumblr.com/post/13513981784/siri


After seeing the testing this woman put it through. It's quite clear that Apple has purposely excluded reproductive health centres, abortion clinics, places to get birth control and possibly even rape crisis centres from Siri. I was inclined to believe Apple before I saw that post. But from that post, it's pretty obvious that there's some intentional denial or misdirection going on. Either on the part of Apple or the engines feeding Siri (Wolfram Alpha).

The part that's particularly sickening is how Siri responds to the input, "I've been raped."

At this point, no one yet knows what Carrier IQ is doing for certain. The only thing that's clear is Apple also has some agreement with Carrier IQ. Oddly it's not resident on any of the Nexus devices which use a "pure" version of Android. Wouldn't that be an indication that Carrier IQ isn't part of Android itself but more likely installed as part of an agreement with device manufacturers and the carriers, Apple included?

Anonymouse, so we don't derail this thread any further, would you like to start a new thread to discuss Carrier IQ? I'll watch for it.

On topic, Siri will only get better. Great move in purchasing the company and improving the feature so quickly.

On the other hand, what do you expect? They are a left-wing organisation that still believes in the original principles of freedom, yet they exist in a fascist country run by feckless capitalists with no governor on their actions at all.

Kind of stands to reason they'd be mad most of the time. I would be too if I lived in the USA.

Funny how I put in 'abortion' into Yelp and get Planned Parenthood as the first hit in New York, NY.

• http://www.yelp.com/search?find_desc...show_filters=1

So where exactly is Apple taking the Yelp results and intentionally altering them to exclude certain Yelp results whilst excluding others as a way to support a political agenda? That just sounds ridiculous!

Wait. So it's cool when Siri gives you a list of escort services if you say, "I'm horny." But if you tell Siri you've been raped and it doesn't believe you and won't even give you the option of a web search or help finding a rape crisis centre, that's people over-reacting? Wow.

Did you read the whole article? I suggest you do before you comment.

And I'm not suggesting Apple has any political agenda. It's quite possible that some overzealous programmer decided to excluded any overtly sexual issue or topic from Siri and effectively excluded all information or sexual or reproductive health.

Finding an abortion clinic is not the worst of it. I find it far more disturbing that Siri won't help when somebody's been raped.

Nonsense. Does Google get sued when medical procedures go wrong because somebody found the clinic on their search engine?

If it did happen, the suit would be dismissed rather quickly.

FUD. Do anti-abortion activists protest outside Yellow Pages, Google and Yahoo offices? All those help you find abortion clinics pretty easily.

Again, Siri queries what it thinks is the most appropriate search engine. As I noted, check out Yelp to see what 'abortion' brings up. I checked it for NYC and got Planned Parenthood as a response. If you don't see what Yelp did because these are businesses that want wide advertisement nor how Siri queried Yelp then you are just choosing to be obtuse.


This is fucking ridiculous. Siri won't help with rape? It's been out for less than 2 months, it's in Beta,yet you are suggesting that Siri is choosing to ignore rape. This isn't just you saying Apple has a pro-life agenda, this is you suggesting that Apple encourages rape.

This screenshot is what has you all upset?

• "I was raped." "Really!"

You do realize that is just one of many default responses to any simple sentence starting off with "I am," "I was," and the like. There is no agenda. There is no evil programmer sitting in Apple's evil headquarters lying to you about how Siri works to then secretly support rape as a way of life.

You're simply ignoring the evidence. It's pretty clear what it is doing on both Android and iOS and it's pretty clear that it's relatively benign on iOS and pretty malignant on Android. You might have an argument regarding Google's "innocence" and "pure" Android, as you call it, if it weren't for the fact that every single Android phone sold by the carriers is approved by Google. So, while Google may not have put it on the Nexus phones (at least not as a root kit like other Android phones), they are complicit in its presence and behavior on other phones, which were all approved by Google. Google knew this was going on, and chose to stay silent and allow it.

What does Yelp have to do with anything? Read that girl's blog. She was quite explicit that Siri wouldn't serve up the name of the abortion clinic mere miles from her house. Yelp may yielf the correct (or more approximate results), but Siri wasn't feeding them to her.


Sad. The lengths some people will go to defend their favourite tech giant. You don't have to answer, but you know damn well how most here would react if this response was Google's answer to the "I'm feeling lucky" button. Even if Google did it for a day....and they'd be right. This kind of stuff should not be treated as a joke or some over-reaction. Ever.

If that's the default answer, then there's clearly been an oversight to what is undoubtedly a serious issue. Surely, Apple's programmers are smart enough to figure out there should be exceptions. They certainly made one for "I'm horny." with the list of escort services. So rape is not a good enough joke to warrant an exception? Is that it?

Like I said, I thought the issue was overblown too until I read that woman's blog. It's quite clear from the whole series of questions she asked (you're just cherry-picking a screenshot), that there's some serious exclusion going on around anything to with sexual health. Personally, I think that just has more to do with the Disney-esque nature of Apple to exclude anything to do with sex from any of their services.

Of course the resident trolls are going to turn this into an argument about Carrier IQ's existence on any device is inately bad and not the severity of that existence on a device. This is an issue because of what was found recorded on an Android device.

So far Android the open OS that allows carriers to add what they want then lock it down is the only one of the half dozen confirmed mobile OSes using Carrier IQ that has a keylogger recording everything you write. So far Carrier IQ on iOS has only recorded some basic telephony data.

Seriously? You are being for real? Siri has been well documented since October and you're asking what the location-based search engine that Siri uses to query places has to do with anything? Unbelievable!


PS: I put "I am horny" into Yelp for NYC and get a gay bar as the first response. I put in "I was raped" and get Foot Locker. I guess that's all part of Apple's agenda.

You have some link indicating Google approves carrier's Android phone versions? I've never seen one. I suspect you made that one up to try and make it something both Apple and Google are complicit in. The fact that Apple has some direct agreement with Carrier IQ is fairly clear. The same can't be said about Google, tho that may only be that it hasn't been found yet.

Again tho, this needs to be in a new thread if you want to continue the discussion.

Carrier IQ being involved with cellphone vendors and carriers isn't an issue. Recording all data or certain kinds of data with a keylogger is the main issue.

Saying Google isn't directly involved isn't going to remove the keylogger off other Android phones and that could hurt sales as most customers aren't going to make detailed core OS distinctions of Android models.

PS: It doesn't matter if it's done by Google, the vendor, or the carrier since it's Google that decided to leave the door open they are approving of others doing whatever they want to the US before shipping. You can cry that you care about this freedom but this freedom to monitor and lock the system before it gets to the end user can hurt the entire platform.

Maybe you should read through the Skyhook lawsuit documents. Pretending ignorance is no excuse.

Apparently, Yelp can find the Allegheny sexual health clinic but Siri can't. The author of the original article has now followed up with another one studying the claims that it's all Yelp's fault:

http://amaditalks.tumblr.com/post/13...38/siri-wrapup

1) What happened to you being oblivious to Yelp's existence?

2) Is Yelp's API not as robust as the web search? Is there an issue with the simple text input on Yelp v. the complex dictation Siri was given and the way the API gets info? You haven't questioned either of these things just leaned on Apple as having a political agenda despite any facts or logic that would indicate Apple would have programmed Siri to exclude abortion clinics.

Here's a test: If you think Siri is infallible technology at parsing or that Yelp's 3rd-party API couldn't affect results then type in "Allegheny Reproductive Health Center,Pittsburgh, PA" into Maps on the iPhone since Apple using Google's mapping API for their own app. If it doesn't drop a pin for it then you can assume Apple has something against abortion clinics, but if they does then you must admit that getting data from different input methods can produce different results.

The author says this:
"And its clear that Yelp is definitely not a leading contender as an information source for other issues, especially health matters, even though some people are starting to leave reviews for providers there. "

It is entirely possible (and actually likely) that Apple doesn't use Yelp for questions of that nature. To prove that point, you'd have to first figure out what source Apple uses for questions of that nature and then see if Apple was providing different results than the original source.

Really disappointing that Apple will listen to this issue and will ignore all of us who claim an option to disable autosave+versions in Lion. If the point is to be politically correct, don't count on me... I use Apple because I'm politically incorrect.

Siri isn't perfect yet. Just attention whores looking for a 10 minutes of fame.

...ignore Siri...ignore search engines...CALL 911!

(at least in the States...or whatever the emergency services number is for your given country)

Why Siri should be degraded for failing to fill in where emergency services are warranted...unbelievable. Get a clue.

Damned ACLU. Imagine the nerve of them trying to defend the Bill of Rights and stop censorship. They're all a bunch of Reds anyways.

So?


Actually, I choose to treat it exactly like that. Because that's what it is.


Yeah, because those two are the same. </sarcasm>


I thought you might be sane until I read this post. Now I think you're a little nuts.


You really don't have anything better to do with your time, do you? My God...if this is a "serious issue," I can only imagine how seriously you take things like the weather forecast and accurate DVR listings.