Are AT&T and Apple conspiring to steal your data and charging you extra to do it?

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2450738&start=0&tstart=0

Don’t read the 37 pages of the thread above if you have a weak stomach or trouble sleeping at night. Currently this is a story with no ending.

I got warning from AT&T that one of my new iPhone 4’s was approaching it’s monthly data limit. This was a phone with the 200mb/month plan that we had been assured would be sufficient for almost everyone, and it was about a WEEK into the month. AT&T provides a web page that lists data usage. I could see that there were charges during times when we were at home, and the phone should have been on WIFI. In addition I could see a big data hit of ~20mb, at 2am one night, when we were sleeping, not even using the phone.

It turns out lots of people are having similar problems, phones connecting over 3G when they should be on WIFI, phones with big data transfers when nobody is using them, discrepancies between what the phone reports for data usage vs AT&T’s site, and on and on.

So I feel trapped into it, but I have upgraded that phone’s data plan to 2Gb. I hope that is sufficient, and wish there was a 5Gb (unrealistically and incorrectly called unlimited) plan.

What a nightmare!