Katarzyna Petru
A new player in the social media market – Neon Mobile – is making its way into the American App Store. And in quite a controversial manner. The app offers users money for… recording phone calls and selling these recordings to companies involved in artificial intelligence.
Sounds strange? Yet – Neon has made it to 2nd place in the Social Networking category in the App Store in the USA, and even jumped into the TOP 10 of the 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 is as follows:
30 cents per minute for a conversation with another Neon user,
up to 30 dollars a day for conversations with anyone,
additionally paid referrals for new users.
The application 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 regulations, the data is sent to AI companies, which 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 provision in the regulations gives the company a “global, 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 application has even made it into the App Store shows how deeply AI is starting to penetrate areas we considered private until recently. Even more surprising is the fact that users are willingly agreeing to exchange their conversations for a few dollars a day.
Neon proves that today, for part of the market, privacy is a commodity that can be sold. And sold cheaply.
