The ACLU last night expressed its concerns re Apple Siri — claiming its tests showed that the voice recognition search assistant feature in iOS 5 gives women seeking birth control or abortion info inaccurate information.
Apple CEO Tim Cook has responded — he did so quickly — saying the omission was not intentional. He wrote:
Nancy,
Thanks for your note.
Our customers use Siri to find out all types of information and while it can find a lot, it doesn’t always find what you want. These are not intentional omissions meant to offend anyone, it simply means that as we bring Siri from beta to a final product, we find places where we can do better and we will in the coming weeks.
I appreciate you pointing this out.
Best Regards,
Tim
Apple’s new CEO Cook was responding to the president of the NARAL Pro-Choice America Foundation, who wrote a letter to Cook regarding her concern that the Apple Siri voice assistant/search feature is giving women seeking abortion or birth control info wrong info. The ACLU and NARAL pointed him to this news report:
