Katarzyna Petru
A new player in the social media market – Neon Mobile – is currently making its mark in the American App Store. And in quite a controversial way. The app offers users money for… recording phone calls and selling those recordings to companies involved in artificial intelligence.
Sounds strange? Yet – Neon has reached 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 the iPhone. Just a few days ago, it was only in the 476th position.
How does Neon work?
The creators promise earnings of "hundreds, or even thousands of dollars per year" for access to our conversations. The business model looks like this:
30 cents per minute for conversations with another Neon user,
up to 30 dollars a day for conversations with anyone,
additional paid referrals of new users.
The app records both incoming and outgoing calls. Officially – only your voice, unless you call another Neon user. Then both sides of the conversation are recorded.
What happens to the recordings?
According to the regulations, the 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 gives itself very broad rights to the data. The provision in the regulations grants the company a “worldwide, exclusive, irrevocable, transferable, and royalty-free license” 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 to the App Store shows how deeply AI is starting to penetrate areas we previously considered private. Even more surprising is the fact that users themselves agree to give up their conversations in exchange for a few dollars a day.
Neon proves that today, for part of the market, privacy is a commodity that can be sold. And cheaply.
