In the age of AI, privacy experts are raising alarms about the huge appetite for user data to feed it as training material. AI companies are paying billions in lawsuits for illicitly using books and videos to train their AI, and users are also being warned about the importance of their personal data, more so than ever. But it seems if you pay people to record something as personal as their phone calls, it’s a hit formula.
What’s the big picture?
“Cash in on your phone data.” That’s the motto behind an app called Neon Mobile, which claims to pay users so that it can record their phone calls. “Profit from your data and choose which calls to share fully anonymously,” the company says on its product page, adding that whatever is recorded is never traced back to the user. The rates are not public, but Reddit discussions suggest that the app is paying over $19 per hour of recording.
The company is trying to pull off a techno-social stunt, it seems, noting that if Big Tech can collect your data and sell it, you deserve a cut for your phone calls, at least. And it seems a lot of users are okay with the idea of selling their call recordings.
According to TechCrunch, the app peaked at No. 2 on the App Store in the US under the free category. To give you an idea, the app is currently ranking ahead of heavyweights such as Instagram, WhatsApp, X, Clash Royale, and Gmail. At the time of writing this article, SensorTower and AppFigures data showed that the app was still trending at No. 4 in the App Store.
But why?
Neon Mobile’s argument is somewhat valid. Tech giants such as Meta and Google have collected user data and built an empire out of it over the years. Neon boldly claims that it will pay you outright for submitting a copy of your call recording. Why, you might ask.
The company says the call recordings will be used to train AI models, and it holds the rights to sell them further to other interested parties. It is one of the scariest and outright dystopian disclaimers I have read in a while. Have a look:
By Submitting Recordings or other information to the Service, you grant Neon Mobile a worldwide, exclusive, irrevocable, transferable, royalty-free, fully paid right and license (with the right to sublicense through multiple tiers) to sell, use, host, store, transfer, publicly display, publicly perform (including by means of a digital audio transmission), communicate to the public, reproduce, modify for the purpose of formatting for display, create derivative works as authorized in these Terms, and distribute your Recordings, in whole or in part, in any media formats and through any media channels, in each instance whether now known or hereafter developed.
AI giants aren’t doing anything too benevolent either. Anthropic says it will use Claude users’ interactions to train AI models and will keep them on servers for five years. Following the launch of the Alexa+ assistant, Amazon ended on-device processing facility, which means all your voice data must go to Amazon’s cloud servers.
