I've been covering Android and other mobile technology for close to ten years now, with a specific interest in phone accessories, e-readers, and what makes each individual phone different from another. I delight in looking at the phone market from as many angles as possible, and while my opinions may be odd, at times, they're always from the heart as much as the head.
I have a background in the mobile accessories world, which explains my odd enthusiasm for cases and things that clip onto smartphones.
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Google Home smart speakers are downloading hundreds of GBs of data in the background, potentially putting limited internet data plans at serious risk of overcharges.
This can only really be noticed if you dive into your router settings and check the usage numbers there, so many will not have noticed the problem. If you have a Google Home smart speaker, then it's definitely worth checking out to make sure you're not impacted by this bug.
Bugged background updates are skyrocketing data use
There's a fix on the way
It's common for smart speakers to download updates in the background. That way, they stay up to date without needing you to manually download and install the latest software — especially helpful on a device without a real interface to use.
However, that means if anything goes wrong, it could be a while before anyone notices the problem.
A number of people on Reddit have noticed that this is an issue though, judging by the amount of posts about this very topic. The first post, from about a week ago, showed one Google Home downloading more than 200GB of data a day. The next post complains about 35GB of data being downloaded a day, while the next two posts show similarly enormous numbers.
Thankfully, my personal Google Home devices haven't been affected by this bug, though it's absolutely worth checking for yourself to make sure. Logging in to your WiFi router should allow you to see how much traffic each of the devices on your network is using. As long as your smart speakers aren't downloading the sort of numbers you'd expect to see on a smartphone or computer, then it's probably fine.
So what's the problem here? As the second post notes, a stuck update seems to be re-downloading several times a day — which is very likely to be the problem here.
There's no word on whether specific models of Google Home speaker are more prone to this than others, but certain posts have noted that their new Home speaker is responsible for this massive data drain. So it may be worth assuming that this is the affected model, and make checking your internet logs a priority.
It would make sense for the latest models to be more susceptible to this sort of problem, given they're more likely to be getting updates more often than much older models. My personal Google Home speakers are very old, and don't seem to have this bug, so the anecdotal evidence plays out in this case. However, you should definitely check, regardless of the Home speaker you have.
If your smart speaker has this problem, then your best course of action is to unplug it for at least the next few days. Google has already confirmed to 9to5 Google that it is working on a fix for this problem, which is likely to be an enormous relief for anyone currently suffering with massive data bills.