How WhatsApp, Facebook, Gmail drain data when you're not even using them

A new app-usage finding, conducted through millions of Opera Max users, shows that on average over 30 percent of all data is used by apps running in the background. Facebook Messenger and Gmail are the most data-hungry apps this way, with some 73 percent of their total data usage happening in the background. Google Drive and WhatsApp showed more than 50 percent background data usage. Google Hangouts uses 39% background data. Why is background data usage a problem? Background data is all the internet traffic that goes on when you’re not actually using an app: email syncing, pre-fetching ads, news articles or feeds - even though you may never read them. “Most apps are made to give a great user experience, not to save data. If you fetch background data through your data plan, it’s like throwing away $1 out of every $3 you spend on your mobile data plan,” says Sergey Lossev, Product Manager at Opera Software. “Most people are not aware of this background data drain and may not have authorized it, nor do they know how to stop it from happening,” adds Lossev.