News and Commentary

Apple’s Siri Told iPhone Users That Israel Is A ‘Zionist Occupation State’ After A Wikipedia Hack

   DailyWire.com
A woman displays "Siri", voice-activated assistant technology, on an Apple iPhone 4S in Taipei on July 30, 2012. Taiwan's National Cheng Kung University has filed a suit against US tech giant Apple, claiming the company's Siri intelligent assistant has infringed on two of its patents. AFP PHOTO / Mandy CHENG (Photo credit should read Mandy Cheng/AFP/GettyImages)
Photo credit: Mandy Cheng/AFP/GettyImages

Apple’s voice assistant, Siri, told users Sunday night that Israeli president Reuven Rivlin “is the President of the Zionist occupation state,” following a hack into Rivlin’s Wikipedia page.

Once one user discovered the shocking response, hundred of other Twitter users verified the answer by asking their own iPhones about Rivlin. They all got the same response and then questioned whether Siri had been hacked, or whether Apple “accidentally” revealed a political — and anti-Semitic — bias through its Siri function.

“Apple HACKED!” one user, @StopAntiSemites tweeted. “When asked who the President of #Israel is, #siri answers ‘Reuven Rivlin is the President of the Zionist Occupation State.'”

“YOU THINK THIS IS FUNNY @apple?” said another. “Jews are literally being killed for being Jewish and this is the game you play??”

“Hey, if you have access to Siri, ask ‘her’ who the president of Israel is,” said yet another, who added a course of action. “Then report the problem to Apple.

Apple eventually fixed the “glitch,” but even that left users questioning Siri’s security.

“Siri is a built-in ‘intelligent assistant’ application that enables users of Apple devices to voice commands to the app in order to perform a string of tasks,” Israel’s i24 News explained. “When Siri is asked about a public figure, the answer is usually extracted from the person’s Wikipedia page.”

Because Rivlin is Israel’s president, not its prime minister — the office most closely associated with Israel’s leadership — vandalism on Rivlin’s page, which took place sometime on Saturday, i24 says, went unnoticed. That vandalism eventually made its way into the data encoded in Rivlin’s Wikipedia page, and Apple’s Siri pulled that faulty data when asked about Rivlin.

An “anonymous user named ‘The Arab Man’ hacked the Wikipedia page and edited the president’s biography, describing him as the ‘president of the Zionist occupation state,'” Ynet news says. The vandalism wasn’t limited to Rivlin’s title, and other questions elicited similarly outrageous responses, “such as depicting him as ‘the main child of Israel.'”

The “wikidata” available to Wikipedia editors shows that “The Arab Man” made the change around 11:00am on Saturday. Wikipedia deleted the vandalism sometime Saturday afternoon, according to the data, which shows a subsequent “reversion” of The Arab Man’s edits. Siri was pulling from cached information — a version of the page with the edits — according to a handful of Apple pros on social media.

Siri has done this before in other publicized cases. It’s drawing on cached wikipedia entries, so some vandalism slips through. Apple will apologize, patch it, and promise to look into it,” one Twitter user said.

Once notified, Apple fixed the problem “within minutes,” but now it’s clear, to both users and wanna-be Wikipedia vandals, that the voice assistant’s connection to Wikipedia’s data makes further “mistakes” inevitable. Even if the Wikipedia page is eventually fixed, the damage remains for some period of time. For conservatives, the concern is two-fold: in addition to concerns about security and veracity, it now appears anyone can update Siri using Wikipedia, a website with a known, apparent leftward tilt.

 

Create a free account to join the conversation!

Already have an account?

Log in

Got a tip worth investigating?

Your information could be the missing piece to an important story. Submit your tip today and make a difference.

Submit Tip
Download Daily Wire Plus

Don't miss anything

Download our App

Stay up-to-date on the latest
news, podcasts, and more.

Download on the app storeGet it on Google Play
The Daily Wire   >  Read   >  Apple’s Siri Told iPhone Users That Israel Is A ‘Zionist Occupation State’ After A Wikipedia Hack