Siri Poses Security Threat For iPhone 4S Users

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A strange bit of news slipped out about the hotly popular Siri voice control system for the iPhone 4S. While you can tell it to do most anything, from find you a decent restaurant to finding you the meaning of life (there’s an app for that, you know!), what Siri will also do is ignore your passcode locks to do whatever people ask of it. But there’s a pretty easy fix that should make this problem go away.

Basically, even on a locked iPhone 4S, Siri will still be active, allowing a variety of tasks to occur such as viewing a calendar, getting contact information, or even making outbound calls. However, even with this issue in place, users won’t have full access to the phone. For instance, apps are shut down no matter what until the phone is unlocked. And any phone number you’d need to call by dialing will be unreachable, only those that Siri could dial.

This is all due to a security setting, which leaves Siri on even in a passcode locked phone. Fixing the problem is as easy as going into the passcode lock menu and switching Siri to “off” as seen in the illustration below. This ensures that, once the passcode lock is set, Siri will be rendered inactive until you supply the passcode and reactivate the phone, Siri along with it.

More than a few have wondered why Apple would have left Siri set to “on” by default when they could have set the default to “off”, thus doing the job that you’ll likely do for yourself if you haven’t already. But seeing as the fix is so simple, it doesn’t matter too much, assuming you know to do it in the first place.

So what about you guys? How many of you have already done the job of setting the Siri passcode access to off? How many of you didn’t know about this until just now? Either way, we want to hear from you, so head on down to the comments section and tell us your stories of Siri passcode woe!