I’m stuck in a contract with Verizon, but if you’re shopping for a new cell phone, I found a cool site called WhistleOut that helps you compare plans for the US, UK, New Zealand, and Australia. I liked the UI, where you can select the type of phone, how many minutes, data, texts you want, etc. Even lets you indicate whether throttled data speeds is OK (after a certain baseline amount).
Google’s tracking you
Do you own an Android smarphone? Chances are, you opted in to passing along location data to Google when you set up the phone…but did you have any idea just how extensive that is? Google’s doing their part to be a bit more transparent here, giving you the ability to view all the location data they have on you. Just go to the location history browser. I wasn’t able to use this as I’ve always been an iPhone user, but this article at TechCrunch sheds some light on the level of detail involved.
There’s no reason to believe that Apple isn’t collecting a similar dataset on its users. There are plenty of beneficial reasons for doing so, but any user of technology needs to be aware of stuff like this..if it bothers you, you can usually opt out.