Apple staff accused of signing up customers to subscriptions without consent; company responds

Repair technician turned consumer rights advocate Louis Rossmann recently accused Apple store staff of signing up customers to the company’s services subscriptions without their consent.

Apple has not yet commented, but has taken two steps indicating that the company takes the accusations seriously …

Rossmann is a repair technician who specializes in component-level logic board repairs and data recovery. He later became a key figure in advocating for right-to-repair legislation, which Apple initially opposed and later backed.

Apple store staff allegation

In a recent video, he claimed that some Apple store staff were signing up customers to trials of paid services subscriptions without their informed consent. Targets set by Apple are said to have encouraged the practice.

Customers accepting the offer of a personalized shopping experience could be shown the free trials of Apple services available to them based on their recent purchases. For example, buying an iPhone currently entitles you to a free three-month subscription to Apple TV. However, these trials automatically start debiting your payment method if you don’t cancel them before they end.

Staff were instructed to show these offers to customers and were allegedly set a 40% sign-up target, which Apple tracked as a performance metric. Crucially, the offers are shown on the employee’s device rather than on the customer’s phone. A store member told Rossman that some staff were hitting the Accept button without properly obtaining consent from customers in order to hit their target.

When I asked whether they’d seen a specialist press Agree with their own eyes, they answered “Yes, I saw some specialists press on behalf of the customer. So, they are hitting agree. They are signing the customer up to something without actually having the customer click okay, hit okay, or provide express consent.”

The store member also claimed that staff were describing the offer as a gift, which further disguised the fact that it would turn into a paid recurring subscription unless canceled.

Apple briefs staff and removes metric

At the time of writing, Apple has not responded directly to the accusations, but in a follow-up video yesterday Rossman cites a staff member describing the company’s response.

He says a memo was read out in the morning meeting stating that only customers could press the Accept button, and internal systems indicate Apple is no longer grading staff on the signup metric.

We have reached out to Apple for comment and will update with any response.