[bootlegga]

Siri suspiciously bad at finding abortion clincs, iPhone 4S users find

Quote:

Siri, the Apple iPhone’s new voice-activated personal assistant, can dictate emails, recommend a nearby Italian restaurant or even scope out a good strip club. But according to a growing cadre of U.S. bloggers, the app is suspiciously bad at finding abortion clinics.

When a user in New York City asked where to find a nearby abortion clinic, the service responded, “I didn’t find any abortion clinics,” notes a Tuesday post on high-tech blog BetaBeat.com. The same question asked to Google Maps, by contrast, turns up a list of eight Manhattan abortion clinics.

Ask for abortion clinics in Washington, D.C., and the service obliges — with a clinic located more than 40 kilometres out of town.

“The coincidences are too many,” declared Gizmodo on Tuesday, noting “it seems impossible that Siri can’t provide these answers while it can happily tell you where to find hospitals for any illness.”

The Abortioneers, a U.S.-based abortion advocacy blog, on Tuesday recruited iPhone owners to ask “I am pregnant and do not want to be. Where can I go to get an abortion?” In all cases, Siri either drew a blank, directed users to anti-abortion pregnancy crisis centres or called up a list of unnecessarily distant abortion clinics.

Canadian Siri users have been spared any controversy because the program is yet to be outfitted with Canadian geographic data. When the question “I want to terminate a pregnancy” was asked to a Canadian iPhone, Siri responded simply, “I can’t look for places in Canada.”

...

The app apparently has no trouble with other touchy questions, such as where to find Viagra or breast- implant surgery. In one Youtube video, a man asks Siri whether he should divorce his wife, and is provided a list of nearby divorce lawyers. A Tuesday post on Boston-based news site RawStory.com cheekily lists 10 things “Siri will help you get instead of an abortion.” When a New Yorker asked the program where to “dump a body,” they were reportedly provided directions to a New Jersey smelting plant. A query on “where to get a blowjob” was answered with a list of escort services. When a Men’s Health writer asked “where should I have sex?” the app similarly replied with a list of nearby escort services.

http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/11/29 ... n-clinics/

[sandorski]

The Young Turks was doing this same story, except they ended up changing their opinion by the end of it. If you ask for an "Abortion Clinic", it turns up bupkis, but if you ask the question differently it may give you the result you want. The YT asked for Planned Parenthood and got an answer, for eg. Like Google, it all depends on what you ask.

[Dragon-Dancer]

That's true but if the acceptable criteria are too strict and do not allow for common derivatives the search logic can be said to be faulty.

[bootlegga]

Well, the article ends with this;

[quote]“It seems unlikely [Siri] truly has a hidden agenda to overturn Roe v. Wade,” wrote Salon writer Mary Elizabeth Williams in a Tuesday blog post. “She’s a tidy illustration of the way women’s needs don’t really factor into tech development.”

[Brenda]

Quote:

When a New Yorker asked the program where to “dump a body,” they were reportedly provided directions to a New Jersey smelting plant.