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Help Google Maps sending constantly?

dir

Lurker
Mar 26, 2010
3
0
Ok, granted that I just got my phone and the battery might still be stabilising, and of course I'm fiddling with it a lot and I've installed heaps of apps, but I can't quite work out something.

I unplugged my phone at midnight and this morning found my phone at 70% charge. I also got a message from my provider that I'd used up all my data. I checked and found that my phone had used up (sent+received) 30MB overnight.

Google Maps was the biggest culprit - it received 700K but it sent almost 8MB. This is while the phone was sitting on my bedside table!

And of course, as I'm driving to work (not using the phone at all), Google Maps was transmitting my location information back to it's servers so that the traffic flow is updated on their systems. That's cool, but there doesn't appear to be any way to disable or turn off this in GM's configuration, or even exit the app.

It seems that having My Location services enabled gives Google Maps (and I'm sure other apps like weather, gmail, Contacts, etc.) free reign to send and transmit data all the time. I don't want to have to disable My Location services completely; I want finer control over things on a per-app basis.

Having Google Maps transmit 8MB overnight might not seem like a lot, but when the phone is idle, it disables wireless (to save battery) and thus all data is going through 2G/3G and I'm incurring data charges. I could easily consume an additional 250MB/month on just this activity alone (or even worse if 30MB is standard for overnight, then 30x31=1GB/month!), which in Australia costs quite a lot.
 

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