Open Radar

 
Marked as a duplicate of rdar://11083948

Summary:
For applications in which data security is of the upmost concern (eg, HIPAA), the voice dictation button on the system keyboard causes concern. For instance, hospitals may not want their medical staff to use a healthcare iOS app if the user is able to use the built-in Siri voice dictation to dictate medical data which will leave the hospital's control and into a system (Siri) that is not HIPAA compliant.

These applications should be able to programmatically disable the voice dictation button on the system keyboard while the user is within the app.

Currently, voice dictation can be disabled OS-wide if you disable Siri (or in some versions of iOS the voice dictation could be disabled selectively within the Siri settings). However, this is not a tenable solution as the user may want to use Siri when not in the context of applications or workflows where healthcare data is in play.

With the new 3rd party keyboard functionality in iOS 8, Apple has recognized that apps that fall under HIPAA may want to disable 3rd party keyboards as they may send data to a non-HIPAA compliant server. From the documentation at https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/General/Conceptual/ExtensibilityPG/Keyboard.html

"An app developer can elect to reject the use of all custom keyboards in their app. For example, the developer of a banking app, or the developer of an app that must conform to the HIPAA privacy rule in the US, might do this. Such an app employs the application:shouldAllowExtensionPointIdentifier: method from the UIApplicationDelegate protocol (returning a value of NO), and thereby always uses the system keyboard."

So, just as the iOS 8 SDK allows an app developer to prevent the usage of 3rd party keyboards, they should also be able to disable the voice dictation button on the system keyboard.

As an aside, the healthcare applications I work on incorporate HIPAA compliant, medical voice dictation in our applications. As such, the Siri voice dictation button on the system keyboard is redundant for our users since we already provide our own implementation of voice dictation that both conforms to HIPAA standards as well as is tailored for a medical vocabulary.

Steps to Reproduce:
n/a

Expected Results:
n/a

Actual Results:
n/a

Version:
Any iOS version

Notes:
A similar enhancement to this was logged with rdar://13019188. However, this Radar focused more on the usability aspect of this enhancement rather than the data security concerns.

Configuration:
Any iOS hardware with a system keyboard