PSA: Using Siri to play your local music may sign you up to the Apple Play voice preview

psa:-using-siri-to-play-your-local-music-may-sign-you-up-to-the-apple-play-voice-preview

Title edit: sorry, should say Apple Music voice preview!

Long story short: using CarPlay I asked Siri to shuffle tracks by an artist that I have albums for on my iPhone. This is my music that I’ve synchronised from my computer. I have no need for Apple Music and have always hidden it using the Settings.app toggle.

After Siri completed the request, it said “now playing tracks by , you can ask me to play music as part of your Apple Music voice preview” or words to that effect.

Sure enough, after pulling over and checking Music.app I now saw the Apple Music service enabled, and a new subscription on my Apple Account for a seven day preview for the Apple Music voice tier with options to upgrade to a paid plan, but no option to cancel this free preview plan.

I think Siri’s logic was:

  • User asked to shuffle all tracks by artist

  • User has some but not all tracks by this artist

  • User has a data connection, let’s ask Apple Music to fill the gaps in their shuffle

  • User doesn’t have an Apple Music plan, but is entitled to a free voice preview

  • Let’s sign them up so I can fulfil the request and play some music

Talking with support yielded no results, who merely stated that the subscription will expire and not renew in seven days. In the mean time Siri will now mix tracks from Apple Music into my upcoming playlist despite me not asking for this, and will undoubtedly include false positives from Apple Music for music I don’t have locally on my iPhone when I try to ask it to play music.

It feels like a dark pattern that I was signed up to the service without explicitly opting into it just because I happened to ask Siri to play music.

Has this happened to anybody else or have I just experienced an incredible fluke?

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Categorized as Apple