It asks people to sign if they want to see Siri and Alexa push back on sexual harassment when it’s directed at them. Now, those findings are being cited in a petition on the social network Care2 asking Apple and Amazon to “reprogram their bots to push back against sexual harassment.” The petition already has nearly 8,000 of its targeted 10,000 signatures.
In February, months before the #MeToo movement erupted, I ran an experiment in which I sexually harassed Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Google’s Google Home to document how these digital personal servants-whose names and voices are already feminized-peddle stereotypes of female subservience, putting their “progressive” parent companies in a moral predicament. “I’d blush if I could” is not the response you’d expected to hear when you tell Siri she’s a slut-but it is.
