AI app Neon Mobile has recently been making rounds on social media. It's not the usual application you see on the App Store and Play Store. It is taking it even further by promising to pay individuals for as personal a thing as phone call recordings.
While this is a decent way to earn some money, some people are concerned about the privacy risks in an age where AI is almost everywhere.
What Is Neon Mobile?
The app invites users to record calls and receive payment for sharing them, stating that the process is completely anonymous and never connected back to the user. Neon Mobile's tagline, "Cash in on your phone data," does its job.
Though the company has not publicly stated payment rates, reports on Reddit indicate payments of more than $19 per hour of recordings. This bizarre method of monetizing data is already gaining traction fast.
TechCrunch reports that Neon Mobile jumped to the No. 2 position on the U.S. App Store's free chart, above names like Instagram, WhatsApp, and Gmail. Even weeks afterward, analytics tools SensorTower and AppFigures indicated that the app was still well-placed in the top five.
Why Are People Signing Up For Neon Mobile?
For years, big tech companies such as Meta and Google have been harvesting huge quantities of user information, frequently without paying users directly. Neon Mobile turns that around by offering to pay you directly for what's gathered. The catch? Your voice data becomes company property, which it then sells to train AI models or to other buyers.
For some app users, the compensation won't be sufficient to warrant forfeiting the voice and personal conversations of the individuals.
A Dystopian Disclaimer
Neon Mobile's terms are startlingly broad. By submitting recordings, users grant the company an exclusive, irrevocable, and transferable license to sell, modify, display, or distribute their recordings across any media, now or in the future. In other words, once uploaded, your data no longer belongs to you.
That's the same pattern seen throughout Big Tech, Digital Trends reports. Anthropic confirms it employs users' interactions with Claude to train AI and keeps them for five years. Amazon, on its part, moved the Alexa+ assistant off-device, so all voice commands now flow through cloud servers.
Providing short-term incentives does not mean Neon Mobile should take advantage of people's long-term concerns.
At the end of the day, this AI app will be the winner because it could take control of your privacy. Surveillance should not be normalized in this AI-centered era.
Originally published on Tech Times
