How far would you go for a few extra dollars? A new app, Neon Mobile, has dramatically burst onto the top of the App Store with a rather unsettling offer: it pays you to record your phone conversations to sell the data to artificial intelligence firms.
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Earn 30 Cents Per Minute for Your Chats
The premise of Neon is straightforward: the app compensates you for access to your audio conversations. It claims you can earn “hundreds, even thousands of dollars per year” in return for your vocal data. The rate stands at 30 cents per minute for calls made to other Neon users.
Surprisingly, the concept appears to be successful. The app has climbed to the second spot in the ranking of social network apps on the U.S. App Store, surpassing giants like Instagram or WhatsApp.
Data Sold to Train AI Systems
The business model is openly displayed. Recordings of your conversations are sold to “AI companies” to “develop, train, test, and enhance machine learning models”.
To sidestep wiretapping laws, the app states it only records “your side” of the conversation unless the person you’re speaking to is also using Neon. Experts question this claim, suggesting it’s likely a way to imply that the recording is complete, but only a partial transcript is provided.
What’s the Verdict?
The existence and success of such an app are clearly a disturbing symptom of the excesses of our time. It illustrates that some people are now willing to trade their own privacy, and that of others, for nominal compensation. This opens the door to severe abuses, such as voice identity theft or extortion.
This approach to data collection is in stark contrast to the philosophy upheld by Apple. With Apple Intelligence, the Cupertino-based company has chosen the opposite path: nearly all AI processing is done locally, on the device, specifically to ensure user data privacy. Personal information is never sent to external servers for model training.
This fundamental difference highlights two contrasting worldviews: on one side, an AI that feeds off our private lives for profit, and on the other, an AI that strives to protect them as much as possible. And you, would you be willing to sell your conversations for a few cents? (Note: the app is only available in the USA, so don’t rush).