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The Google Home Speaker Has Been Secretly Eating My Wi-Fi Data

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The Google Home Speaker Has Been Secretly Eating My Wi-Fi Data

If you had to estimate how much data your smart speaker was using over the course of a couple of weeks, would you guess three terabytes? That's what one Google Home Speaker user discovered when he checked his home Wi-Fi's usage, according to Reddit posts reported on by 9to5Google. The Google Gemini-powered smart speakers have apparently been downloading huge amounts of data to the device over the past two weeks, which could put a serious damper on your Wi-Fi network.

While it isn't happening to everyone, after checking my own home internet usage, I found out that I have been experiencing the same issue. My Google Home Speaker has used 487 GB of data in the last ten days, using almost as much as the entire rest of my home between August and September.

Google confirmed this bug has only affected some devices, and that they've rolled out a solution. A spokesperson from Google told WIRED: “A server misconfiguration caused some Google Home Speakers to repeatedly download a software update. This issue has now been resolved.”

Looking into this issue made me go beyond just Google's usage, though. My husband and I started reviewing the data usage for all of the individual devices that our router could identify and found some surprising numbers. The weirdest highlight was that Amazon was listed as using 22 GB in the last week with only the Ring smoke detector set up in my house, which was similar to the use of one of the smartphones in my house.


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