With "What" to the vulva: Siri irritates iPhone users with intimate image
If you start a search on the iPhone with the word "What", you may be presented with an explicit image of the female genital area.
When you enter "Was", the iPhone search can currently return the above result – in the original, the image remains unpixelated.
(Image: Mac & i)
Apple's search suggestions can currently lead directly to the display of an unexpected intimate image. If users start a query in the system-wide search on the iPhone with the simple term “what”, the first hit may be a photo of a vulva with a piercing. It comes from the Wikipedia entry on the so-called “Christina piercing”.
This can also happen if the word “was” is typed into the address bar of Apple's Safari browser. By default, Siri also delivers website suggestions as the first hit – before common search terms, such as those provided by Google or another search engine. As many search queries are likely to start with the word “what”, more and more users are probably stumbling across it.
What is a Christina piercing?
It remains unclear where the unexpected link comes from. Apparently, Apple's search technology automatically supplements the input of “What” to “What is a Christina piercing” and then delivers the Wikipedia entry as a supposedly matching hit. Mac & i was able to directly reproduce the behavior on an iPhone with iOS 17 and a Mac with macOS 15.2, where “What” also led directly to the aforementioned Wikipedia article as a Siri website suggestion, including display of the photo stored there.
On an iPhone and iPad with the beta of iOS or iPadOS 18.3, the reference to the Christian piercing also appeared, but only far down in the search results and was therefore at least not immediately visible.
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The first forum entries about the phenomenon date back several weeks, and the access statistics on the Wikipedia page show a sharp increase shortly before Christmas. A Reddit entry currently draws attention to this. Some users also report that the vulva image from the Christina piercing entry also appears when searching for “Christ”, but this was not the case on the Mac & i editorial team's devices. In the discussion about the Wikipedia entry, there were already calls for the image to be removed.
Switch off Siri search suggestions
Another problem is that the image can also appear on children's devices, even if Apple's integrated nudity filter is activated, which is supposed to make such content unrecognizable. However, this obviously does not work in the search results.
To prevent such Siri suggestions from appearing, several settings need to be changed: In iOS 18, this must be switched off under “Settings > Search > Show related content”. In iOS 17, this can be found under “Settings > Siri & Search > Show in Spotlight”. You also need to deactivate “Safari suggestions” in “Settings > Apps > Safari” so that the Apple browser no longer displays this either.
(lbe)
