Slashdot Mirror
Facebook Blamed For Driving Up Cellphone Bills, But It's Not Alone
colinneagle writes "Consumer site MoneySavingExpert.com reported today that it has seen "many complaints" from users who believe a recent increase in data-related charges on their cellphone bills are the result of Facebook's auto-play feature. The default setting for the auto-play feature launches and continues to play videos silently until the user either scrolls past it or clicks on it; if the user does the latter, the video then goes full-screen and activates audio. The silent auto-play occurs regardless of whether users are connected to Wi-Fi, LTE, or 3G.
However, it's likely that Facebook isn't entirely to blame for this kind of trend, but rather, with the debut of its auto-play feature, threw gas on an already growing fire of video-sharing services. Auto-play for video is a default setting on Instagram's app, although the company refers to it as "preload." Instagram only introduced video last summer, after the Vine app, a Twitter-backed app that auto-plays and loops six-second videos, started to see significant growth.
However, it's likely that Facebook isn't entirely to blame for this kind of trend, but rather, with the debut of its auto-play feature, threw gas on an already growing fire of video-sharing services. Auto-play for video is a default setting on Instagram's app, although the company refers to it as "preload." Instagram only introduced video last summer, after the Vine app, a Twitter-backed app that auto-plays and loops six-second videos, started to see significant growth.
Security whining about Facebook aside, there's a plethora of countries where your 3g/4g data limit per month is quite low. I've just come off a 600mb per month plan to 1gb. I only use about 300mb per month but I have on holiday gone up to about 800+mb in a month.
The cost however, when you exceed your limit is _insane_ auto playing videos which you can't damn well stop is idiocy. They should have either a wifi only option or a play button. (I had the same issue with vice videos in twitter for a while too)
Too many companies continue to take their product, fiddle / fuck with it for the sake of change (keeping UI designers in a job I suspect) and then antagonise their users. Google maps is a prime example, the new google maps is AWFUL compared to the existing one, lacking several key features. Please, stop fiddling and changing things.
I use Chrome and Firefox and autoplay is driving me nuts. Is there an auto-play killer out there?
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
Have you ever seen documentaries where poor people have to spend hours every day getting clean water, and it just makes you step back and realize how fucking easy you have it to have clean water on tap at all times? That's how I feel looking at the cellphone data situation in the US. I'm paying for the single cheapest cellphone plan I can get here in Taiwan, and I get 1.5gb of data with that. And that limit only kicks in after the first six months of free unlimited data expires.
Sure, the facebook design is absolutely retarded, but I don't come close to my limit despite using facebook as a primary means of communication with most of my friends and family. Point your anger in the right direction.
No, the Facebook (mis)feature truly is autoplay. The video starts playing (without sound) until you click on it, at which point it goes full-screen and enables sound.
Ok, so you're saying "never launch the Facebook app" is the only responsible choice? These are videos that autoplay without audio when they're not even visible on the screen, so you don't even know that this is happening. (Ok, for the FB app, there is a setting to disable this, but the fact that people haven't heard of this without multiple news articles on the topic says that FB's default caught a good fraction of their users by surprise.)
I personally have been bitten by autoplay ad videos on my BB10 when trying to visit news articles. I haven't found a way to disable video auto-play on this phone with its browser at all. (No, disabling Flash doesn't help.) Are you saying that the only responsible action is to never browse the web from my phone, so I never get bitten by a website that might spring an unwanted, unwarranted (and usually unrelated to the article) video on me? If I browse the web, I'm irresponsible?
Please, do explain how personal responsibility plays a role here, and what it translates to for someone who has no interest in viewing any videos ever on his/her smartphone unless they explicitly ask them to be played. Do tell me how to rectify this moral failing.
Program Intellivision!
On my BB10 (which I otherwise quite enjoy), many websites will autoplay video. I'll click on an article to read it, and then 10-15 seconds later (sometimes faster, sometimes slower), it'll freeze and force me into a full screen video due to autoplay. Sometimes I can get it to stop quickly and can go back to the article, but quite often I just swipe to make the video not-full-screen and immediately close the page.
That gap between opening the page and getting hijacked by the video appears to be buffering time. That burns bandwidth my connection before I even get a chance to know it might be happening. And, as you say, it's a special kind of awfulness. I'd love to disable this autoplay, but there doesn't seem to be any option for this. (FWIW, disabling Flash doesn't do it.)
At least FB has a setting where you can disable this. The fact it's taken multiple 'news' articles on multiple websites to get the word out, though, hints that FB's roll out of the feature is antisocial at best. If nothing else, they should have defaulted it to preloading only if it was operating over WiFi.
Program Intellivision!
Ok, as explained elsewhere, this isn't autoplay per se but rather auto preload. That is, the video consumes bandwidth with no outward indication it's doing so. Again, do explain how the miracle of personal responsibility solves this.
Program Intellivision!
The underlying problem is the perpetual screwing that US mobile carriers inflict on customers. How they can defend the devolution of options is perplexing. No great alternatives so we must pay to play. I have lived outside the US for 6 years (while still paying for my US Verizon 5-phone family plan) and from Cyprus to Germany to South Korea the mobile plans are better priced, more robust, and reasonably fair to the consumer.
I love how the first comparison with Facebook is to Instagram...
I think someone needs a reminder as to who owns Instagram: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
Lets face it. Wifi data plans are a big scam. Operators do not want you to use data plans because they want to screw you with the calls, and do not want 1) people giving up voice and using only voip 2) killing all the revenue on international calls 3) often they are in bed with your local cable operator, or worse, they are an arm of it. For all those that have no alternative than using mobile Internet for PC connectivity, it is quite simple to install Flash+facebook+adblocking software to save on you bill. Nevertheless, it is worth to point out that a 1GB plan wont get you nowhere, and it is really not enough on this days. Back in here, I only use wifi, but then I have wifi at home and at work, and also we have a huge FON infra-structure here, where we can pretty much find a FON hotspot nearby.
Odd... because FaceBook calls it "auto-play." Right in the obscure setting in their own app that admittedly allows it to be turned off or set to Wi-Fi only.
Odd... because the videos in the newsfeed will play without anyone clicking on them. You merely have to scroll through the newsfeed and land near a video.
Which are the majority... it's well known that you have to have truly worked to keep a grandfathered unlimited data plan since the 3G-4G transition.
Since you appear to have no actual experience with the FaceBook mobile app, you'll forgive me for telling you to STFU concerning the relative awfulness of your fictional app versus the actual app. I mean really... you were so certain of how the current app functions that you thought nobody who actually used it would call you out on these 'minor' discrepancies?
Farcebook is a worthless application that has no inherent value other than wasting time and advertising how we live our daily activities. Who cares that I went to the mall, who cares that I hiked 10 miles, geez, and better yet let me advertise when I am not going to be home for the thieves to come ransack my home. This is an application that need to go away.
This is the kind of thing that conveniently makes the case for anti-neutrality by making products like Facebook Zero look like a good deal.
I doubt that anyone at facebook or any other company explicitly designed their apps this way in order to promote "zero" services, but at the same time I think their interest in pushing facebook zero is a disincentive to correcting the problem.
I started a shared data pool plan for my family and my brother's usage was estimated at about 2GB per month. A couple weeks into the billing cycle I checked usage and my brother had used MORE data than the other FIVE of us combined, and was on track to use over 5GB! We talked about it and it turned out he had the new facebook app installed and complained that the videos had started autoplaying. He found it annoying. We did a quick search and found that the DEFAULT setting is to autoplay videos as you scroll past them, regardless of the connection type.
We changed the setting to "Wi-Fi Only" (or never) and nothing else about his usage. His average daily bandwidh went from 150MB to 50MB.
Facebook's new, annoying, default setting was on track to add 3GB PER MONTH of data usage! (30 days * 100MB)
We were lucky to be on a new plan with 6 people that I was monitoring to make sure we had the right data plan. An extra 3GB of data sent to a casual users ought to earn Facebook some kickbacks from cellphone providers!
Help! Help! I'm being repressed!
Too many companies continue to take their product, fiddle / fuck with it for the sake of change (keeping UI designers in a job I suspect) and then antagonise their users. Google maps is a prime example, the new google maps is AWFUL compared to the existing one, lacking several key features. Please, stop fiddling and changing things.
In this case, I believe that it was a deliberate change forced on their users because it will directly benefit Facebook. Auto-play artificially increases the click-thru rate (or whatever method they are using to measure user interaction with ads these days). Facebook can then show these inflated numbers to advertisers to justify their premium rates.
"Hey, you pay more to place video ads on Facebook but its worth it because most (all) of the viewers will see it/click on it!"
This again drives home that to Facebook, we are not its customers, we are it's product.
I'd like to pin the blame for this, not on Facebook, but on the people who write the browsers. You can assume that there'll be some stupid site on the internet which will try to waste your bandwidth - but a browser shouldn't permit it to do so. Browsers should never auto-play videos.
If you read TFA:-
Nothing to do with browsers.
Unlimited 4G data for 34,50 euros / month.
I'm sorry if I haven't offended anyone
And you are assuming that all Facebook users have the knowledge, means and expertise to determine which are their "apps that autoplay/preload huge amount of data" or even know their data problems are caused by "apps that autoplay/preload huge amount of data" in the first place.
The average users of Facebook include grandmothers, hollywood idols, truckers, senators - people who may not be technologically inclined.
Come on, be fair.
> The sane choice of course would be for the facebook app to limit mobile data usage by culling data-heavy features as video autoplay
Don't you mean "The sane choice would be to drop FaceBook" ? The service, and its encouragement of careless video and image uploading, is extraordinarily and unnecessarily bandwidth heavy, especially with the constant pre-caching of both advertising and facebook poster content one has no _intention_ of ever actually selecting, but which winds up pre-cached because you opened someone's web page to read their post or check a social announcement.
Absolutely right.
On the other hand, we still require these not-technologically inclined people to select and sign-up for a data-plan. The proper selection already requires them to be available to connect "seeing videos on cellphone" with "huge data volume required"
So if an app starts to play video, one should know that you're going towards your data limit at bullet-speed. And who else but user (and cellphone provider) know where that limit is? That information is not availble to the facebook app and so that descision has to be made by the user.
I know we can't and shouldn't expect that from facebook-app-user Joe Sixpack, but we already expected him to estimate his bandwidth and monthly data usage when signing up for a data plan. Sp you either can expect an informed descision about video loading or you need to start way earlier.
And for the sake of the argument imagine a good salesperson who is not intrested in just selling the most expensive option and asks "Are you planning to watch mobile video on your phone?". If the user answers "no" here and suddenly sees videos on ths phone, he should remember that his plan may be a bit too small for that.
bickerdyke
To be honest, that was the case long before this auto-playing video situation (and it goes equally for accessing Facebook via the website or any other means, too).
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
tumblr app autoplays gifs, so to speak (previously it just showed a preview and you clicked on it to see it) thus making it useless for two reasons.
First, it eats throuh gigs of data in no time. More importantly, 4g can't keep up with it and the fast scrolling you may want to do. Some clueless ass designed that one in a vacuum.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I participate in the beta for the Android app. We've had several updates that re-enabled that feature. smdh. It boggles my mind that not only did FB think this was an important feature missing from their application, but so important that it needed to be enabled by default. smdh again.
but the fact that people haven't heard of this without multiple news articles on the topic says that FB's default caught a good fraction of their users by surprise
The only thing wrong here is the assumption that the news articles have any relation to people's knowledge or usage on a given matter. I'm sure the newspaper would run a front page headline saying "THE SKY IS BLUE" if they could sensationalise it and some how make it look like it's disadvantaging the poor common folk.
The blame lies not with FB but with providers artificially limiting how much data your device can consume on a technically irrelevant time scale for profit.
1G of data is enough for ~1 hour of streaming video. So that means that you can easily burn through your allotment in a day or two for regular usage.
It's not like they can't provide you with the bandwidth, the bandwidth is not what's being measured after all. And they all collude with each other to provide the same crappy service.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Am I the only person that likes this? So many videos should be soundless, but have stupid commentary or music.
Half the videos I watch are the auto-play only ones now.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Facebook now taps into smartphone microphones "just to get a 'fingerprint' that we don't save". This will drive up data usage as well, and is also being done clandestinely.
I come here for the love
I have an iPad and and Android phone and on both devices when the app was updated with the autoplay feature the app displayed an alert the first time to was launched post-update that talked about the autoplay feature and explained exactly how to turn it off in the settings of the app.
In my opinion, Facebook is not really the one to blame here because although the default is to autoplay videos, users were clearly informed when the feature was added and given clear instructions on how to change the setting.
And where on the label does the Facebook app say how much data it's going to use?
And how about the fact that for a long time, the FB app was fine, and then a change that FB pushed out to folks surprised them later only after they were using it?
That's only true if there's a wide-scale boycott. Otherwise, network effects suggest you're wrong. It's like arguing "Not using Windows is supposed to hit Microsoft harder than yourself." BS. Microsoft hasn't felt a thing since I switched to other platforms years ago. I, however, have had to deal with incompatibilities and quirkiness. For the vast majority of users it never made sense to switch from Windows and it still doesn't, and the reason why is network effects.
Your arguments remind me of the 'Countepoint' guy from Airplane.
The issue here is that most smart phone plans make you, the user, responsible for paying for the total amount of bandwidth consumed, but the phone and the apps don't give you a good mechanism to allow you to act on that responsibility in a meaningful way. Saying "Well, then, don't use it" is unhelpful and unrealistic.
Program Intellivision!
What about an app that burns the bandwidth of playing a video as part of its 'preload', but never provides feedback that it's doing so? Is the user supposed to be clairvoyant?
Program Intellivision!
I use the Tinfoil app for Android. It's for the paranoid inside everyone. I seriously doubt they will ever preload anything.
If I am actually interested in the video, I have to go back to the beginning. And sometimes the humor or entertainment value is ruined by me seeing later parts on mute. It's so much more annoying than just starting videos I'm interested in, and has resulted in me actually viewing a lot less videos on facebook. Unless they want to kill peoples' data limit and get worthless plays to videos, I don't see the point.
I just checked out Tinfoil. It's still a way to access Facebook, therefore it still fails.
I think you must have missed my point: using Facebook at all is irresponsible.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
OK, so what's the realistic way to use an app that uses more bandwidth than your plan includes?
If you want to use an app that plays video (and you want to use it outside of your wifi) you need a way to get those videos to your phone.
I basically agree with you on that here
The issue here is that most smart phone plans make you, the user, responsible for paying for the total amount of bandwidth consumed, but the phone and the apps don't give you a good mechanism to allow you to act on that responsibility in a meaningful way.
It's not that bad as decent mobile OS offers you options to a) see and meter the data volume used up per application and restrict network activities that are not triggered by actively using the app to a wifi environment ("background data") and even have a list what wifis aren't anything but tethering hooks for another mobile data access.
And as you mentioned, the other problem is feature creep. An app gets added a video play feature, and the data usage goes up. But it's still the app developers who have the right to decide what the "correct" scope of features for their app is. And asuming the developers aren't complete morons, tradeoffs in size, network usage, accessibility and such have been carefully considered and are outweighed by new benefits. (If not, the devs probably ARE morons, but everyone has toe right to make their own app worse than before.)
bickerdyke
I didn't miss your point. My daughter is out of state and the ONLY way she communicates in a timely fashion is by Facebook. She doesn't even have a celllphone and only calls infrequently. Therefore if I want to communicate with her, I have to use Facebook. I detest it as much as you do, but Tinfoil makes it less retchworthy. My love for my daughter is stronger than my hate for Facebook. Between Tinfoil and emails notifying me she has sent me a message, I find it acceptable. Tinfoil only runs WHEN I want it to run and does not use my location nor does it "send or receive" text messages without the owners consent.
How do you switch off Facebook's auto-play feature?
OK, so what's the realistic way to use an app that uses more bandwidth than your plan includes?
If you want to use an app that plays video (and you want to use it outside of your wifi) you need a way to get those videos to your phone.
Maybe grab a still image of the video from about ten seconds in along with a, "Click here to view this video" link? You know, so you only download a ~20 KB image instead of a 10 MB video of something you have absolutely no interest in?
Facebook's problem is they think that EVERYTHING with no exceptions that appears on your wall is going to have your unending interest.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
I started a shared data pool plan for my family and my brother's usage was estimated at about 2GB per month. A couple weeks into the billing cycle I checked usage and my brother had used MORE data than the other FIVE of us combined, and was on track to use over 5GB!
I was a bit disappointed originally that I wouldn't get shared data when I switch my extended family over from AT&T, Verizon and Sprint (seriously, all 3 other networks!), but I soon realized this was a huge boon - because T-Mobile doesn't charge overage for data - only steps down when you reach the limit (i.e., data limit is for "fast data" - i.e., LTE or 4G, but the 2G is unlimited). So my post-grad cousin who has erratic data usage doesn't impact my bill or my speeds. My bills never change month to month - been that way for over a year now, and it's an awesome feeling (remember having to try to parse a cell-phone bill wondering why we paid $130 this month and $80 last month for the same line).
Oh, and I'm spending the same on phone bills - except now I have 5 lines where I used to have 3, and all with better data and reception than before.
Lesson: don't trust shared data - it's makes each line on your plan a liability for increased data costs on your entire plan, all possibly due to a rogue app.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Clearly it's a typo - the feature is that you automatically pay more for mobile data. I only wish I was kidding - remember, this is the same "CEO" that openly thought his users were "dumb fucks".
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
It does not do this on any Facebook page I've seen. I don't know what your browser or Facebook settings might be, of course.
Saying "Well, then, don't use it" is unhelpful and unrealistic.
Ignorant people always suffer. Law of nature. They get suckered into eating bad, buying bad, into paying more for most things, electing bad representatives, visiting websites which are out to screw the users.
Knowledge is the solution to many of these problems. Including this particular one.
Did you discover this just now?
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
So my phone has FB installed by default and they know exactly what
data plan I have.
There seems to be no reason to pay data overages because of
vendor installed applications. There seems to be a fundamental
conflict of interest, evidence of fraud or bait and switch.
I am not talking about an auto with a speedometer that goes to 120 mph
sold in states with maximum speed limits well below but a clear misrepresentation
of purpose in marketing.
Speaking about strange numbers. Phones are marketed with standby
times and talk times that are impossible given the default software,
default settings and most likely distance to cell tower service.
I am most likely moving my number to my old old old Nokia flip phone.
It has standby time in days not hours. I see nothing smart in the battery
support for most smart phones.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.