The Karma Hotspot gives you free data each time you allow someone to share your hotspot.I hate when products make me a shill by alerting everyone on Facebook when I use them. Maybe I don’t want to share what pictures I’ve viewed on EyeEm, and I certainly don’t want Spotify telling anyone I listened to the Archies.
Which makes the Karma Hotspot somewhat confounding. It appears to be one of those apps that overshares, but it isnâ€t.
The Karma Hotspot acts as a go-between to connect a Wi-Fi phone, tablet or computer to the Web using the mobile phone network. It gives away data - 100 megabytes’ worth - when you sign up, and each time you allow someone to share your hotspot. That 100 megabytes is equivalent to downloading about 300 e-mails or 15 good-quality three-and-a-half minute songs.
To make joining easy, Karma’s registration is through Facebook. All you need is an e-mail address and a Facebook password, and you’re in. In fact, you can’t currently sign up without a Facebook account. The company said it was working on an alternative.
Here is where the confusion comes in. When you sign up with any app through Facebook, it asks if you want to allow the app - in this case Karma - to share information. If you say yes, you will see a message telling you that Karma can share posts on your timeline. That makes it look as if it ! will.
But, although the mechanism is there to share, said Robert Gaal, Karma’s chief executive, the app doesn’t send any automatic notifications, so it doesn’t matter. In a test, Karma sent no unwanted alerts.
To be doubly sure, you can take another step to protect your privacy in Karma’s Facebook settings. Look for the little gear icon in the upper right corner of your Facebook home page. Click it for a drop-down menu, and choose “account settings.â€
On that page, in the left-hand column, you should see an icon with the word “apps.†Click it to see a list of apps. Where you see Karma, click on “edit.†That should open a list of options, with “Visibility of app†at the top. Click on the drop-down menu there and choose “Only Me.â€
That should ensure that no automatic posts go out.
As for how the app works after the sign-up, the data speed at my desk wasn’t blazing. Although the device promises 4G speeds where available, my average was 1.8 megabits pr second, which is less than half the speed I average on the AT&T LTE network, and was too slow to run YouTube videos without periodic freezes.
The roughly 3-inch-square Karma hotspot hardware costs $80. If you just want to buy data without signing up friends, it’s $14 per gigabyte.
