My iphone was stolen last night. Early this morning, I noticed that they had used all of my data, 32 GB. In a typical month, I can’t even begin to make a dent in 32 GB. What would a thief do that is so data intensive?
Porn sites?
Another possibility is streaming a ton of video.
They probably were not using the data just through the phone interface. I doubt they were watching movies on the phone. I’m guessing they used your phone like a wifi hotspot and had computers uploading/downloading something.
If you contact your provider, you may be able to get a list of websites they contacted during that time. You should probably also let them know your phone was stolen in case that data was from some sort of illegal activity. You don’t want the police thinking you were doing it.
Man. I have a cap of 10 GB a month on my 4G data. After that, it’s throttled. At 2G speeds, it would take about three months for me to use 32 GB.
You can blow 32 GB downloading a single Bluray disc from a torrent. (For example.)
My daughter used up 8-10 G in about 12 hours one time. I want to say she was downloading a bunch of games, and I am thinking that a whole bunch of unwanted material came down with those games.
Just out of curiosity, I just checked for the largest torrent for a popular series. Game of Thrones was the first thing that came to mind. There is a torrent of season 1 on Bluray that is 214 GB.
(Sounds like a lot, but my ISP’s speed is 60 megabits a second, which means you could download a file that size in less than 9 hours.)
I was curious so I looked up how big all of Mystery Science Theater 3000 was, apparently it’s only a 140GB torrent for all 200 hour and a half long episodes. Granted since most of them never came on DVD I imagine most of them are 700MB AVI rips, and I can’t imagine how big that file would be if you were to somehow get blu-ray quality rips of each movie.
On a cellphone? Most cell plans have a high speed cap. As I noted, I’m limited to 10 GB of 4G data per month. After that, you’re usually restricted to about 128 kps.
No, I was just giving an example of something trivial (a couple of hours of movie viewing) that still takes up multiple gigabytes of data.
Depends on the codec you use. The current highest compression for a given quality is h.265 (unless there is something even newer that I don’t know about) which can give darn good HD video quality at a few hundred kilobits per second–but is very CPU intensive.
Which is not relevant to the OP. The thief who stole dalej42’s iPhone burned through 32 GB of his mobile data, not on a computer. There may be wireless plans that let you have couple of hundred GB of data a month, but they’re not common. Once you use 5 or 10 GB in a month, a wireless connection isn’t practical for downloading anything on a throttled connection.
And filmore said “I’m guessing they used your phone like a wifi hotspot and had computers uploading/downloading something.”–which is a reasonable guess.
NM. Withdrawn.
Bad math deleted.
I’ve binge watched shows on my phone for about 6 hours a day for 5 days for a month and I think my peak usage was about 45GBs. I use a lot of data on the side too, but no torrents which would seem to be the only way to get that much data in that short of a time. (I’m still locked into an old Sprint plan of unlimited text and data at 4G for $80 a month.)
A friend of mine has a portable Wi-Fi router here in Japan. She uses 10-12GB daily mostly watching YouTube. No torrents or other downloads.
If you’re curious I think for most metered cell phone plans like Verizon etc. you can go the web interface for your account and a few menus in get a read out of how the data you used was allocated re streaming, media sites etc.
The first thing that came to mind is that they were distributing kiddie porn around the world.