Rush Limbaugh, Siri, and the wrath of the technocrati

19.04.2012

He types up a brief account of what happened and emails it to "some computer people" asking for feedback. "I said, 'What could possibly explain this?' And the answers I got back ranged from, "You've been hacked," to, "Somebody got into your car," to, "Somebody's tampered with the Bluetooth module." Other suggestions, he says, were "Somebody's done something. They're sending you a message that they can do it," "Your Bluetooth module is so totally defective that you need a new one," and "There's something wrong with the LTE hotspot."

Limbaugh's response is interesting: "There was no answer that was satisfactory."

He didn't expand on why he found them unsatisfactory. But it's clear that the suggestion he'd been hacked was one of the suggestions he found unsatisfying to explain the events he encountered.

He notes again that Siri works by offloading the voice transcription to backend servers. Given that fact, he then wonders "Could it be that somebody at Apple can ID my phone, knows when I'm voice transcribing and can send something back? Could that possibly be? Who knows? I have no idea."

The issue of what information Apple collects and stores from iPhone and users, including what Siri adds to that information, has been a persistent .