Wireless bill shock is one of those know-it-when-you-see-it things.  It happens when you get socked with charges that are hundreds or even of thousands of dollars higher than your normal monthly bill. See some local cases here ($17,500 to watch a movie in the Dominican Republic) and here (unexpected data roaming charges in Europe).

The FCC says bill shock has happened to about 1 in 6 wireless customers - about 30 million people. The agency defines it as "a sudden and unexpected increase in monthly wireless bills" when consumers don't realize they've blown past plan limits for voice, data and text, or get hit with unexpected international roaming charges.

At least for now, the FCC is taking a voluntary approach to addressing the problem, which coincidentally makes somebody a lot of money - though it's not entirely clear how the U.S. carriers share in proceeds collected on behalf of overseas roaming partners.

The voluntary approach relies on alerts to people at risk of overage charges, and carries an October 2012 deadline.  To encourage quicker compliance, the agency is keeping public track of how the carriers are doing. So far, only T-Mobile has hit the trifecta, offering alerts for voice, data, and international-roaming overages.

You can find the chart, which includes links to the carriers' policies, by clicking here.

T-Mobile, which was kept alive last year when the Justice Department blocked AT&T's attempt to swallow it, is also busy trying to remake its image with a racy new commercial featuring its familiar spokeswoman on a motorbike - to signify speed, of course, not sex. Whatever you think of that approach (you can see the commercial below), give the fourth-place carrier some credit for focusing on substance as well as style.  

It's always fascinating to see yourself through other people's eyes. Courtesy of Austin Frakt at the Incidental Economist blog, here's a link to the latest report card by the Conference Board of Canada on the health status of our neighbor to the north and 16 of its peer countries, based on data collected by the OECD.

"They score themselves a B," Frakt says of Canada. "Guess which country is at the bottom of the list?"

You can find details here from the report, which tries to address the question of why Canada, which is immensely proud of its health-care system, only gets a B and lands in the middle of the pack on this ranking of wealthy nations. Yes, "wait times for some health care diagnostics and treatments" is cited as one potential source of drag - an acknowledgment sure to cheer diehard opponents of changing the U.S. system, in which the well-insured and affluent can get costly diagnostic tests and treatments more swiftly. On the other hand, the United States leads all nations in what we pay for our health care, and we earn a D, with especially low marks for infant mortality and life expectancy. If only we could remove the poor and uninsured from the data....

One common thread: It appears both countries have a touch of Lake Woebegone Syndrome. We may not be the healthiest countries around, but we both earn A's for "self-reported health status."

The Fair Labor Association was asked last month by Apple to audit three of its Foxconn final-assembly manufacturing plants in China - the massive, city-like factories where iPhones and iPads are produced for the world market.

The nonprofit group said yesterday that its inquiry, which included a survey of more than 35,000 randomly selected workers, had found "serious and pressing noncompliances with FLA’s Workplace Code of Conduct, as well as Chinese labor law."

This morning, PC Magazine says, Foxconn promised changes:

FLA said its assessors logged more than 3,000 staff hours - observing conditions inside the plants, reviewing policies and procedures, examining documents such as payroll records and production schedules, and interviewing hundreds of Foxconn workers and managers both on- and off-site. Summing up its finding, it said: "FLA found excessive overtime and problems with overtime compensation; several health and safety risks; and crucial communication gaps that have led to a widespread sense of unsafe working conditions among workers."

You can read the whole report here, and find specific documentation here.  The audit marks an important step in the right direction for Apple, for its Chinese contract workers, and for customers of Apple products concerned about reports - some apparently fabricated, but not all - of working conditions that many Americans would consider inhumane.

Business groups bitterly opposed the Consumer Product Safety Commission's new publicly accessible product-injury database, SaferProducts.gov.  It was designed to enable consumers to quickly report injuries linked to products such as toys, cribs, and household appliances - things that are usually safe but that occasionally come with dangerous defects - and to enable other consumers to search for such reports if they have particular concerns about an item.

It's too soon to tell if the new database, which posted its first reports on April 2, 2011, will significantly reduce the lag time between discovery of a defect and a product's recall, or encourage manufacturers to monitor  their own products more aggressively. But a report today from the Consumer Federation of America, Kids In Danger and Consumers Union suggests that the database is working largely as intended.

You can find the report here. Rachel Weintraub, senior counsel at the CFA, says that the vast majority of 6,000 reports in the first 10 months involve newer, well-identified products and reports from consumers themselves, in contrast to opponents' warnings that third-party advocates would clog the database and that manufacturers would be harmed by vague gripes involving older products. 

"It’s not someone talking about their 30-year-old refrigerator in the basement," says Weintraub, who notes that 84 percent of the injuries are linked to products identified by model names or serial numbers. "It’s definitely providing more information to the public, it's providing more information to the CPSC, and it's providing more information to manufacturers to evaluate the real-world use of their products."

About 40 reports came from medical professionals, medical examiners or coroners, and about 60 from other public-safety professionals.

I blogged here about plans for the database, and why advocates such as Weintraub believed it would be valuable, and here about efforts to kill it before it got off the ground. Those efforts haven't stopped - as I wrote in a column last fall, the new database remains a target, and has even been attacked in an unusual "Company Doe" lawsuit.

But for now, SaferProducts.gov is a resource for consumers who want to warn about product dangers, or to see if anyone else has raised concerns about something they were given or plan to buy. 

Kids In Danger just released another new report, A Measure of Safety, with this hopeful statistic: "Children’s product recalls announced by CPSC in 2011 dropped by 24% to 121, the lowest number since 2006."

For parents (or anyone else buying or passing along stuff for young children), Kids In Danger is another great resource.  One of its key messages, based on the senseless tragedy that led to its founding, is that no recall ever succeeds 100 percent.

With all eyes today on the Supreme Court and the future of Obamacare - or ObamaRomneyCare, if you prefer - it's easy to overlook other news from Washington. But here's one that will matter to anyone who worries about Internet data tracking.

The Federal Trade Commission has issued its long-awaited final report on "best practice" for protecting American consumers in an era of ubiquitous digital data. And FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz says he's hopeful that it's all the nudge industry will need - with the threat of congressional action if self-enforcement fails.

“We are confident that consumers will have an easy to use and effective Do Not Track option by the end of the year because companies are moving forward expeditiously to make it happen and because lawmakers will want to enact legislation if they don’t,” Leibowitz said in a statement.

The FTC says its goal is to make "privacy the 'default setting' for commercial data practices - a huge and complex challenge, as the report acknowledges, in an era of "smart phones, smart grids, and smart cars [when] companies are collecting, storing, and sharing more information about consumers than ever before."  So let's hope the optimism is warranted.

I've been out of the office, and will be for another week, but this merits mention: Mike Daisey's widely quoted account of labor conditions at an Apple contractor's plant in China has been retracted by This American Life, the radio show that broadcast it, for what host Ira Glass calls "significant fabrications."

I cited Daisey's report in a column two weeks ago about Apple's China problems, though I also noted that Apple was quietly questioning some of Daisey's most dramatic assertions, including the presence of underage workers at a Foxconn final-assembly plant.

In a blog post, Glass says the fabrications included some of those assertions:

You can listen to the retraction, or find a transcript, by clicking here.  Despite its embarrassment, This American Life wisely tries to focus its latest account on the problems that Apple has publicly acknowledged at plants in its supply chain. For instance, as I wrote two weeks ago, Apple's "Supplier Code of Conduct" limits workers to 60 hours per week, and requires at least one day off out of seven. Yet Apple own 2012 "supplier responsibility" report said that more than half of the workers at each of 93 facilities had labored more than 60 hours during at least one week in a 12-week sample. And more than half the employees at 90 plants had worked more than six days in a row at least once per month. (You can find Apple's reports here.)

Apple deserves credit for its transparency, and genuinely seems focused on improving conditions for those who make its dazzling products.  But Daisey's journalistic sins shouldn't obscure the fact that conditions at plants that make products for Apple - and for virtually all its high-tech competitors - would violate norms throughout the West, and sometimes pose threats to workers' health and safety.

Credit unions added more than 1.3 million customers last year, more than twice as many as in 2010, according to this story in the Los Angeles Times.  That brings the number of credit union members to a record 91.8 million, the National Credit Union Administration says.

This chart from MyBankTracker.com may help explain why:

AT&T Mobility has now clarified which customers are subject to the wireless-data throttling I described last week, though it still isn't explaining exactly what happens to them, or give a good reason why - other than that they have the temerity to think that "unlimited data" means what it says.

The bottom line: If you use less than 3 gigabytes of data per month on your iPhone or a similar device, or less than 5 gigabytes on an Android that runs on the speedier LTE network, there are no limits on your unlimited data.

But go past those limits, and you'll be throttled until the start of your next billing cycle.

How severely? AT&T still isn't saying - though it's also still not disputing reports of a 99 percent drop in speeds.  That may sound like an enormous reduction, but it's consistent with what T-Mobile has acknowledged doing to customers who pass the stated caps on its data plans: They still get data, but essentially at 2G speeds, not 4G. AT&T says its throttled customers will "still be able to email and surf the web."  Presumably you'll recognize them as they stare blankly at nearly blank screens, or mutter curses at a mute Siri.

T-Mobile says it wants its throttled customers to consider moving to a plan with higher limits.  AT&T implies that it wants them to move to tiered plans, and also that they're data hogs: In January, it says, "the top 5 percent of our unlimited data plan customers used an average of over 50 percent more data than the top 5 percent of customers on tiered plans."

Interestingly, that "50 percent more" statistic appears to conflict with 2011 data that I and others reported last week from Validas, a Texas company that reviews wireless bills for customers. But it's more likely just an example of how statistics can be spun.

Validas, which sampled more than 55,000 cell-phone bills, found that AT&T's unlimited-data customers used about 25 percent more data, on average, than customers on tiered plans.

So is usage really soaring? Maybe not.  Validas' sample examined the top 5 percent of all AT&T data customers - about 41.5 percent of them unlimited-data customers.  For its purposes, AT&T is comparing the top 5 percent of unlimited-data customers with the top 5 percent of customers on tiered plans - customers who face overage charges above prescribed limits.

However you slice the data, there's limited evidence that many people are grossly abusing the unlimited-data plans. Validas says the top 5 percent of AT&T's unlimited-data customers used an average of less than 4 gigabytes of data per month. Validas says just 0.7 percent of all AT&T smartphone customers used more than 5 gigabytes per month.

Data hogs? Perhaps they're just people who believe the word unlimited means what it usually does.

Here's AT&T's statement, provided via email:

In today's Tech Life column about broadband data caps, I told the story of Andre Vrignaud, a Seattle gaming consultant who says he was suspended for a year by Comcast because he twice surpassed the company's 250-gigabyte-per-month "excessive use" cap.

Comcast, which imposed the cap in 2009, is hardly alone. Five of the seven largest broadband providers now impose some sort of cap, and a sixth, Time Warner Cable, is experimenting with one. Only Verizon has refrained so far - and, as I reported, it's not making any hard promises.

That's a shame, because Verizon could be singing its technological advantages from the rooftops. "We don’t see the congestion that the cable companies are seeing," John Schommer, Verizon's director of broadband security and cloud services, told me. "We have a network that can handle a substantially higher volume of traffic." And Schommer can rattle off the tech specs to back that up: a network that can deliver 2.4 gigabits downstream shared among 32 customers, versus a good cable system's 320 megabits per second that he says may be shared, in a good case, among 200 customers.

But perhaps more significant, Verizon has seen no necessity so far to cap its DSL customers, either. Which brings me back to Comcast and its cap-happy brethren, CenturyLink, Charter Communications, and Cox, all of which threaten to cut customers off for blowing through a cap that at Charter can be as low as 100 gigabytes per month and at Cox as low as 30 gigabytes.

Bandwidth is increasingly cheap, as Netflix general counsel David Hyman argued last year in a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled Why Bandwidth Pricing Is Anti-Competitive.  But even if it weren't as cheap as it is, or if network upgrades required additional revenue to justify, the facts raise a basic question: Why aren't the other carriers doing what AT&T does - simply charging the so-called "data hogs" more for excess use?

Vrignaud, who would bristle at that term, has done extensive research on this question and has made a lot of noise in the technology trade press. His conclusion is that the answer is obvious: The real goal of the caps is to protect a business model that includes selling data-heavy content and services to customers over what the broadband companies consider their own "non-public" portion of the Internet, and to guard against competitive encroachments.  That's the same goal, by the way, that broadband providers have aimed for in their fight against net neutrality. Meanwhile, caps seem to have emerged as another way to skin the same cat.

Of course, Comcast isn't arguing that it wants to protect its turf - it's arguing the necessities of "network management."   And that's the argument Vrignaud is countering. 

In particular, Vrignaud takes issue with the explanations Comcast has given repeatedly that monthly caps help spare other customers on a shared neighborhood node from congestion - a goal that he says could be addressed without a hard cap and even without overage charges.  He challenged the statements of Comcast's Charlie Douglas, who told me that Comcast believes it has set "a reasonable, transparent, and fair threshold" for excessive use, and that the number of suspended customers is "extraordinarily small."

"We feel that that is an extraordinarily large amount of data. That limit is there to make sure we provide a great online experience for every single paying customer," Douglas told me.

In an email exchange today with Douglas, copied to journalists and others, Vrignaud said Comcast continues to beg key issues - especially the questionable relationship between temporary congestion, which Comcast addresses through other network-management protocols, and overall monthly data usage.

The exchange began when Vrignaud asked a question he says Comcast has continually sidestepped:  "Why do you insist on completely cutting off data instead of using other more consumer-friendly options such as charging for overages or slowing internet use?"  It homes in on some of the key issues.

For instance, Douglas responded, in part:

... at Comcast, we don’t currently offer a usage-based billing option. Instead, we have decided to take the approach of having a very generous and large threshold and policy that, ultimately, does not impact more than 99% of our customers. That’s because in our experience, the overwhelming majority of customers who go over the threshold and who we call and ask them to moderate usage do so voluntarily.

We’ve worked hard to make our residential data usage threshold clearly known in our terms of service and on a webpage with numerous Q&As.

As a reminder to everyone, here is the link to them http://customer.comcast.com/help-and-support/internet/common-questions-excessive-use/

Last year, Andre, you made some thoughtful suggestions regarding how we could sharpen some of that language in those Q&As and we listened to you and incorporated that feedback. So, thanks again for that.

To which Vrignaud replied, in part: 

... The question is not whether or not you "offer a usage-based billing option." The question is: Why do you insist on completely cutting off data instead of using other more consumer-friendly options.

And the question goes on to highlight several examples of more customer-friendly options, including: potentially charging for overages (as do your competitors), slowing internet use through careful throttling, or allowing people to use your network at night when it is presumably not under heavy load, and/or "congesting" neighbors.

Speaking frankly, I believe the the reason Comcast refuses to answer the specific question above (including discussing the consumer-friendly options) is that there is no good answer. There is no reason Comcast can't invest in simple APIs that would allow Amazon and Carbonite to enable their users to upload content at night when your network is under-utilized and hence has no "neighbor impact." And there is little to no correlation between heavy users and network congestion. ...

If you want to read more about the issues Vrignaud has so doggedly raised, you can find links at his website, where he's consolidated many of them into a single post: The Day Comcast's Data Cap Policy Killed My Internet for 1 Year.

With the expansion of Internet video and other data-heavy services, this issue will only grow in importance.  Caps may not matter to you today - Douglas says the median Comcast  customer uses just 8 to 10 gigabytes per month - but still matter to you next year, or the year after.

Netflix says HD video, for instance, can involve transmission of 2.3 gigabytes per hour, which means that by watching 25 hours per week you'd be closing in on the cap. I'm not at risk, but that's supposedly well below the average amount of TV watching in U.S. households today, and the Internet allows different family members to watch different things on different devices.

And that doesn't take into account the other cloud-based services, such as Carbonite's data backup or Amazon's media player, that tripped up Vrignaud and are just beginning to make their marks.

Or the next new new thing - which really may be what this debate is all about.