Siri doesn’t hates abortions, it just hates you

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In what is surely the most ridiculous, manufactured controversy in – well, at least 15 minutes – Apple has been accused of having a pro-life stance because Siri, the voice-based assistant built in to the iPhone 4S, is unable to locate nearby abortion clinics upon request. I won’t be linking to any of the relevant links, because they’re not worth your time, and I don’t want to give them traffic.

What some of the more hysterically-minded conspiracy theorists fail to acknowledge or understand is that Siri is simply a front-end for a very sophisticated – but still very fallible – search engine database. And one of the first things that any beginning programmer learns is GIGO: Garbage In, Garbage Out. In other words, your software is only going to be as good as the data it’s working with. What’s more, Siri is a beta product, and Apple is striving to improve it.

This is basically what Apple said to the New York Times when asked.

Hopefully some enterprising iOS developer is already on the case and working on a GPS-based abortion clinic-finding app as we speak.

This is one of those days that working in Apple’s PR department must be a truly thankless task.



  • Anonymous

    Cause Apple is known for supporting conservative causes, right?

    If you’re considering having an abortion, you should probably do more research than asking your iPhone and going to the first place it turns up.

  • Anonymous

    Trolls gotta troll, Peter. The world works that way.

  • https://twitter.com/#!/danielhedlund Daniel Hedlund

    Can you find vasectomy information/clinics on Siri? Otherwise, somebody should write something angry about that too ;)  

  • http://www.thegraphicmac.com JimD

    Good grief. Another instance of people going out of their way to be offended.

  • http://twitter.com/Moeskido Moeskido

    One wonders whether Yelp users are fully disclosing their preferences for medical help.

  • Anonymous

    Why have I seen this on the news all day when there are much more important issues that actually affect us, i.e. Carrier IQ?

  • http://mangochut.net/ mangochutney

    This is the kind of article that makes me want to give you a hug, place a SOCOM M4 in your hands, point to the ammo on the table and say “Go get ‘em tiger.”

  • His Shadow

    As an aside, since Google has fucking ruined the idea of “Beta” for everyone, now it’s “just an excuse” to remind people that from day freaking one, Apple said elements of Siri were a work in progress, hence “beta”.