Verizon: How Much Do You Charge Now? – Pogue’s Posts Blog | via NY Times
Here’s how it works. They configure the phones to have multiple easily hit keystrokes to launch ‘Get it now’ or ‘Mobile Web’—usually a single key like an arrow key. Often we have no idea what key we hit, but up pops one of these screens. The instant you call the function, they charge you the data fee. We cancel these unintended requests as fast as we can hit the End key, but it doesn’t matter; they’ve told me that ANY data–even one kilobyte–is billed as 1MB. The damage is done.
The phone is designed in such a way that you can almost never avoid getting $1.99 charge on the bill. Around the OK button on a typical flip phone are the up, down, left, right arrows. If you open the flip and accidentally press the up arrow key, you see that the phone starts to connect to the web. So you hit END right away. Well, too late. You will be charged $1.99 for that 0.02 kilobytes of data. NOT COOL. I’ve had phones for years, and I sometimes do that mistake to this day, as I’m sure you have. Legal, yes; ethical, NO.
I used to see this all the time when I had Verizon with the phones my kids used. And I charged them for the data they were using that they weren’t supposed to be, UNTIL I had to use one of their phones and realized just how easy it was to accidentally hit a “data” button.
Pogue’s article is worth a complete read and it’s idiocy like this that I’d love to see end.