Rant about wireless data usage

Billing for data-network usage is such a scam because the user can never verify or confirm the usage! If Verizon says I used 9 GB of data, 1 GB over my limit, how on earth am I supposed to verify that? I can check the breakdown among web, games, social media, video, navigation, etc. But Verizon can't tell me exactly what apps I've used. For example, every, single month Verizon shows that my husband and I use abut 3% of our data on games. However, we NEVER play games on our phones. When I called Verizon to ask about this, all they could say was that we MUST have played games because the system is showing that. I asked what games we played.They said they can't tell us. Such a scam.

On my iPhone I can go to Settings, then to Cellular, and scroll down to see an app-by-app summary of what the data is being used for. I reset it from time to time so that I can see which of my habits are greediest. I'm assuming Android phones have something similar.

OMG. You're right! Even so, there's no way to verify. If I saw a dress from Bloomingdale's charged to my AmEx, I know for certain whether or not I bought a dress from Bloomie's and how much it cost. There is no way ever to know exactly how much data I've used. They can hike it up a tad, reaping millions each year. There's no audit.

Also, the only game I ever have played on my phone is Scrabble, and I have not played it for about a year. Still, my data usage that shows when I log into Verizon is 3% games every month. Still a scam.

As I said, you have the tools to monitor your usage. Reset the counter on the billing date and track your monthly usage if you really think your carrier is cheating you. (much as you might do if you didn't trust your electric meter reader)

Even is Verizon is inaccurately estimating the sources of your usage each month, that doesn't show that they are scamming you on the actual volume of data used. I kind of hope my wireless company is NOT keeping detailed records of exactly how many KB of data I'm using on each app, as their business needs do not require quite that much personal information.

Calling it a scam just because you don't choose to watch carefully over every bit of data doesn't make it a scam, and accusing companies of inflating the numbers without any proof is a bit unfair.

3% of 8GB/month works out to 8MB/day leaking through.

Curiously, that's about the same amount an App would transmit if it was beaming plain text GPS coordinates every 1-2 seconds.

Are you sure nobody has Pokemon Go secretly still on their phone? Anybody in your plan a big fan of Geofencing? Turf Wars? Ingress? Do you leave location services turned on all the time?

ETA: If you'd like to count the 'game' bandwidth as a percentage of your 1GB overage, it uses about 24% of that 1GB. You may uninstall all games and you will still be over next month unless you find out what to do with that other 76%

How about the possibility that the games are running in the background to allow push notifications? Or location sharing, or whatever else runs in the background...

jimmurphy said:

How about the possibility that the games are running in the background to allow push notifications? Or location sharing, or whatever else runs in the background...

Yeah, I was wondering about that. How do I stop that?

my husband is having the same problem. Group texts and sending texts with pictures also use data I was told by vrizon