Patrick Hendricks filed lawsuit against AT&T for overcharging iPhone, iPad owners

Patrick Hendricks filed a lawsuit in California federal court in which he claimed that AT&T is systematically overcharging its customers who are using its services on iPad and iPhone. According to the Suit, AT&T is not fare in cutting the charges of the data that the user actually uses. The company exaggerates the data and charge extra money.

Hendricks claimed that the company charged him $15 extra money in result of this unfair policy. He gave a best suited example of this policy of AT&T as if it a gas pump which only fills the tank nine-tenth and change for whole tank.

Hendricks also claimed that the company also charged for phantom data which he never used in his device.

As a proof, Hendricks hired a private firm to monitor the data usage on his device after turning off all kind of notification, applications, location-based services and email account setup. Even then the private firm monitored 2.2MB of data usage of one week on his device. Hendricks is claiming for its money back whereas AT&T decided to fight this case against Patrick Hendricks.

According to a PC world, the overcharging can be due to multi-touch feature of iOS 4 because some of application keeps running in the background even after the user turn them off manually.

Many of those apps may be actively communicating and downloading data in the background. So, perhaps the data issues that users are seeing, and that AT&T is being accused of systematically overcharging for, are–at least in part–a function of the “virtues” of adding multitasking to iOS. I can tell you this: once we realized all of these apps were running and started manually shutting down all of the multitasking apps, my data usage issues went away.

(Published by Technama - February 2, 2011)