The iPhone’s standby mode is coming under fire from the state-controlled media in China, which released a new report claiming Apple’s smartphone is stealing data from customers.
High data rates are currently a huge issues in China, so the China’s state TV, CCTV, ran a test to see how much data bandwidth the top smartphones are ‘stealing’ while you think the device is off. The report accuses iPhones of stealing up to $10 of bandwidth every month.
CCTV put ten smartphone to the test by leaving them on standby for 120 hours. They they tracked the devices’ data usage via China Mobile’s official site. All ten phones wasted some data in standby, but the iPhone was the worst, passively chewing through 80 MB of data. Sony and Nokia’s phones only used 4MB of data during the 120 standby period.
China Mobile charges RMB 15 for 110 MB of bandwidth, so those little megabytes could add up to around RMB 60 (about $10) over a month, charges the Chinese media. Apple and China’s state media have had a rocky relationship over the last few years as the network claimed Apple’s a security threat. Despite the bad press, China has become Apple’s top market for iPhone sales.
Source: Tech in Asia
Buster Hein is a freelance writer who lives in Phoenix, Arizona. Twitter: @bst3r.
5 responses to “China’s state TV accuses iPhone of stealing data”
Nothing like a CCTV hit piece…
You know, there are places like Honduras, Thailand, Laos, Burma where labor is cheap and the potential workforce is young and easily trainable. I’d love to see more companies ditching the Chinese who are always accusing people of stealing while they have their hands in your back pockets! Hell, do more business with Samsung and scale back on dealing with Communists.
Meanwhile, the rest of world are accusing Xiaomi of stealing customer data.
How precious. How dare anyone take data from anyone. Thats Chinas job.
you can go into settings and prevent data usage while on LTE, in other words it does not have to be this way. in other news, many carriers offer unlimited data or enough that $10 is nothing in USA. China is jsut behind the times. smartphones are data hungry because apps need to axs the web. this is truly a pathetic attempt to talk rubbish. , imagine when apple music comes to china, now thats some serious music streamin. maybe in 10 years they’ll get spotify and other similar apps that use alot of data and they’ll realize their complaints are pathetic.