Mobile Data Charges Causing People To Waste Millions Of Dollars
Yesterday we brought you a feel good story about Twitter, one of the mainstay services in the social media world, and how it was used to help track down and save a carjacking victim in South Africa which was really nice but today we have news about a new study outlining how we waste money when it comes to mobile data charges.
British company Carphone Warehouse conducted a survey of 2,034 people and found that pretty well half of the people – 47 percent – had no idea about their service contracts containing data allowances or free texts and minutes.
Not knowing this information has lead them to overspend just over $300 per person per year or as Carphone Warehouse calculates it a waste of $8 billion per year because they are on the wrong plan and in addition a $275 million dues to additional data charges while roaming.
81 percent of those polled did not realise that having a Twitter app on their phone can still eat up data, even when not in active use.
43 percent were unaware that using the Facebook app on their phones incurred a data cost, and 51 percent did not know that video calling a friend through Skype on their handsets was not necessarily inclusive in their tariff.
via All Twitter
This shouldn’t really be all that surprising since those contracts we all agree to are written in such a way that our eyes begin to glaze over after the first couple of paragraphs. The sad part is that this will probably get even worse with the increasing popularity of iPads and slates.
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Steven Hodson Steven has been around the tech world long enough to see most of the stuff we think of cool happen before which leads to a certain bit of cynicism that has contributed to him being known as the cranky old fart of the Internet. Besides sharing some of the goodness that he finds with you here at 42x you can also find him curating some digital goodness at Winextra (tech type stuff) and Rotten Gumdrops (for your daily dose of WTF).
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