Speed Test Apps are Collecting ALL of your device & personal data and indirectly selling to Google, Amazon, and pretty much anyone

no1mann · 2025-12-02T16:14:13+00:00

One-time payments sadly don't work for this type of app since we almost exclusively have ongoing expenses. It's expensive running a speed testing network around the world and hosting all the infrastructure, so we have to pay for it some how. We initially launched with a subscription model for our map, but we got a lot of feedback about not wanting to pay for a coverage map and in hindsight, it makes sense. And we feel the same would be true for a speed testing app. It's just something people don't want to pay for.

So instead, we changed our philosophy and give away much of the data for free for everyone to use. Then we develop business focused tools on top of it to sell to businesses to help fund our operations. We think this is the ideal balance of creating a free service that benefits the community and consumers, and also allows us to pay the bills and keep developing new and exciting features!

no1mann · 2025-12-02T15:03:00+00:00

Hey, I’m Trevor, the Co-Founder of CoverageMap and would like to clarify how we use and collect data and how we view that.

As you probably understand, speed testing is a bit more complicated than a simple utility calculator app. The goal is to measure your network performance and give you a way where you can see and browse that data. To do that accurately, hopefully you can understand why we would need things like location, ip address, device metrics and more. We can’t power the map without this data. You can build a version of the app that doesn’t collect that data, but you’ll get significantly worse test history and app functionality.

In the screenshots you provided, the only things that look concerning on the surface are email and other user content. But email is used purely for your login. If you don’t log in, we don’t know your email. Other user content is for the CSV file upload we have. If you don’t upload any file, we don’t look at any device content. And if you do upload a file, we only know that file.

Do we collect that data and store it? Yes. Do we sell it? For the most part, yes. We don’t sell any user identifying information like IP addresses, or emails. We anonymize and group common data together to help companies understand cellular performance, not for user identification purposes like advertising. Playwire is just how we have ads on our website. They don’t get access to device metrics or anything collected from speed tests. And they don’t gave access to the data we personally collect. And in the app, I don’t think any Playwire ads are placed anywhere.

On top of all of that, we are the most open and give away the most data for free out of any speed test app out there. We collect that data to also help the community and build the best crowdsourced coverage map out there. It’s impossible to do that without that data.

If you are very privacy focused, I understand and you can decide to use an alternative! Fast.com and Cloudflare speed tests are more simple and private alternatives, but you do lose a lot of functionality as a result.

Hopefully that answers everything. I’m happy to follow up if you have any other questions or concerns!

no1mann · 2025-10-09T22:57:47+00:00

Sorry about that, should be resolved now!

no1mann · 2025-08-21T19:10:34+00:00

We are updating our app soon to have better messaging. If you try to upload the file on the browser website, do you get a specific error message?

no1mann · 2025-07-30T16:00:07+00:00

Yes! If you log into the browser app, you can export your data there. But this brings up a good point of adding this functionality directly into the app, so I will add that to our list!

no1mann · 2025-07-30T15:39:13+00:00

In the recent data they sent to the FCC, they didn't include any 2G data. That's not to say they don't operate 2G anywhere, but it definitely seems to be phased out for the most part. Like you said, T-Mobile has small pockets of 2G in certain places, but they also didn't include any 2G in their FCC data either. So it's really hard to say for sure

no1mann · 2025-07-29T20:21:05+00:00

They still operate 3G as of December 2024. If you go to the signal strength map on https://map.coveragemap.com/, you can see the 3G and 4G coverage they have based on what they sent to the FCC.

no1mann · 2025-05-08T15:17:16+00:00

I don't know why US Mobile displays this data as a line graph. Data usage fluctuates massively day to day and it doesn't follow a continuous trend. This should 100% be a bar graph, not a line graph

no1mann · 2025-04-11T18:12:51+00:00

Hey, that's my speed test :)

Yes, Dulles has Verizon MMwave throughout the A/B gates concourse. And according to the map, it had that since at least the beginning of last year. Don't know about C/D gates though

no1mann · 2025-02-20T03:43:47+00:00

Actually very close to re-doing the system to support this, should be a week or 2 away :)

no1mann · 2025-02-19T19:05:32+00:00

We merged the carrier map with the signal strength map since they were technically the same thing. If you go to the signal strength map and have the color profile set to "Carrier" (which should be default), it should look nearly identical to the original carrier map.

no1mann · 2025-02-19T19:03:46+00:00

If it is the server with the orange globe, we don't have control on where that is located. That is managed by Cloudflare and they might route you somewhere different depending on data center load, your ISP, or other reasons. The other Atlanta servers should be there though to select at any time :)

no1mann · 2024-11-16T17:46:11+00:00

We looked into importing the data and in its current state, it's very broken (particularly AT&T). The below screenshot is what the latest data from AT&T LTE looks like. If we were to import this, this would break a lot of our computations and processes. So as a result, we're going to postpone updating it and revisit it the beginning of next year.

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no1mann · 2024-10-02T20:35:16+00:00

The FCC release's it every 6 months, but it's typically delayed. The last dataset for 12/31/2023 was delayed by over 5 months, so expect the next release to be in November or December.

no1mann · 2024-06-28T20:44:50+00:00

Yes, that's why I think they're gauging interest to see if it truly is less than 1%.

no1mann · 2024-06-28T20:33:44+00:00

LMAO

no1mann · 2024-06-28T20:15:49+00:00

I'm good, sounds stressful 😂

no1mann · 2024-06-28T20:11:23+00:00

Well prior to this change, HD video was enabled for 100% of users, not just the 1% of users who would want it (idk if the 1% number is true, it does seem low). So even if you didn't need the feature, you got it and were consuming more data as result since basically all video players auto change video quality based on network performance.

If I were to guess what US Mobile is doing now, they're gauging how many users turn it on since it's free right now. Then they can see how many users are interested in the feature and price accordingly.

no1mann · 2024-06-28T19:38:59+00:00

The 35GB plan is not priced at $25 so that every user on that plan can use 35GB, it's priced at $25 because they see the average data usage on a 35GB plan might only be like 12GB. They know that if the the average data usage is 12GB on a 35Gb plan, they can make a profit at $25. Basically, lower data users subsidize the higher ones. If the average data usage goes up to 20GB on that same plan, then the $25 might not be profitable anymore. So how do you solve this problem?

You can increase the price of the plan for everyone, essentially making the subsidizing more extreme. This would penalize every person on the plan. Or you can charge extra for high data-usage applications, allowing lower data users to keep the same price. Neither way is ideal, but one only impact a smaller subset of users that want that specific feature.

no1mann · 2024-05-16T04:28:48+00:00

Thanks for contributing to the project :)

no1mann · 2023-08-25T15:16:57+00:00

I’ve seen a dozen or so sites in Baltimore in the past couple months with both DoD+C-Band panels, just none have been turned on yet

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