Reducing Monthly Data Usage

What Internet traffic does Onavo collect?

"Onavo provides services for reducing data usage of certain mobile phones. To benefit from the Services, your access to the Internet through your mobile phone will be routed through Onavo's servers, which strive to reduce the volume of your downloads, and potentially your uploads as well.

When you use the Services, Onavo will collect information, such as session durations, page impressions, details of your mobile operator, Internet protocol (IP) addresses, the domain name that served you to access the Services, and content types and origins.

Onavo will also store information related to online data or metadata that is routed through Onavo's servers, such as webpages' addresses, structures, data fields, and images. However, Onavo will not store any content that you upload or download, such as message text, filled-in forms, and data that a website retrieved."

No thanks.

 

I figure I'll let the guinea pigs try this one out first

 

It is interesting, but who are Onavo?
More importantly, how are they using this offering to make money?

Reading through their privacy policy, there's a lot of "marketing friendly" information that they collect. I'll be sticking with just regular data for the moment anyway!

 

First reviews on itunes seem good.....gave it a download to test it out....Opera mini uses way less data then safari but it is nowhere near as smooth but I sitll use it to cut down 3G data use when out and about

 

webpages' addresses: aka someone will see your every move online
data fields: username and passwords?

 

Onavo

Hi all,

I'm Guy, cofounder at Onavo. Thanks for posting about us, I wanted to respond to the questions that have come up.

Who is Onavo?
Onavo is a VC-backed startup. We want to help users take back control of their phone's data usage, understanding what's costing them and helping to reign in these costs. You can read about our team here - http://blog.onavo.com/2011/02/meet-the-onavo-team/ (I'm the guy at the bottom-right).

How does the app work?
When you install Onavo, it sets up your iPhone so that data your receive from the Internet is streamed through our cloud-based compression servers, which are located in datacenters operated by Amazon Web Services. The techies here will notice that the second step after installation prompts you to install a Configuration Profile - this includes a proxy setting, which is how this works.

Why is Onavo free?
This is a special time-limited offer following our launch on April 29th. In the future, the app will come at a cost. As Onavo helps users save money we are confident that it will be justified to ask for a small fee in exchange for use of the service (that will be low enough that you still save overall).

What does Onavo do with user's data?
We take our user's privacy very seriously so we store only the bare minimum necessary to support the service - all aggregated and anonymized. This is so that the app can report your savings, app usage, etc. Additionally it lets our researchers improve the service by for example concluding that a certain app is a data hog across many users. We do not store any content such as messages, passwords, etc. Additionally, any sensitive content that is encrypted (HTTPS) can not and will not be processed by Onavo.

I'd be happy to answer any additional concerns or questions. Feel free to ping me here or on Twitter @guyro.