Katarzyna Petru
A new player in the social media market – Neon Mobile – is making its way into the American App Store in quite a controversial manner. The app offers users money for… recording phone calls and selling those recordings to companies involved in artificial intelligence.
Sounds strange? Yet – Neon found itself in 2nd place in the Social Networking category in the App Store in the USA, and even jumped into the TOP 10 most popular free apps on iPhone. Just a few days ago, it was only in 476th place.
How does Neon work?
The creators promise earnings of "hundreds, or even thousands of dollars a year" for access to our conversations. The business model looks like this:
30 cents per minute for talking with another Neon user,
up to 30 dollars a day for conversations with anyone,
additional payments for referring new users.
The app records both incoming and outgoing calls. Officially – only your voice, unless you are calling another Neon user. In that case, both sides of the conversation are recorded.
What happens to the recordings?
According to the terms and conditions, data goes to AI companies that use it for training and testing machine learning models. In other words – your conversations become fuel for artificial intelligence.
The problem is that Neon grants itself very broad rights to the data. The clause in the terms gives the company a “worldwide, exclusive, irrevocable, transferable and free licence” to sell, store, publicly perform, modify and create derivative works based on your recordings. In other words – they can do practically anything with them.
Privacy for Pennies
The fact that the app made it into the App Store shows how deeply AI is starting to penetrate areas we used to consider private. Even more surprising is the fact that users willingly agree to give up their conversations in exchange for a few dollars a day.
Neon demonstrates that today, for part of the market, privacy is a commodity that can be sold. And at a low price.
