This new app pays you to use your call recordings for AI training - but is it worth it?

Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET's key takeaways Neon will pay you to share your phone calls. The app sells recordings of your calls to AI companies for training. You can earn as much as $30 a day. A new app is promising to give you hundreds or even thousands of dollars per year. And all you have to do is share your phone conversations for the purpose of training AI. Yep, there's always a catch. Free to iPhone owners via Apple's App Store and Android users at the Google Play Store, a new program called Neon - Money Talks will pay you for certain phone conversations that you share with the company behind the app. Recordings of your phone calls are then passed along to AI developers who use natural language to train their chatbots. Also: Does your generative AI protect your privacy? New study ranks them best to worst Before you nix the idea of sharing your private phone calls for a few bucks, know that Neon is near the top of the charts among the most popular free apps in the App Store. That must mean a lot of people are willing to put their privacy up for sale, at least at the right price. Before I come down too hard on this whole concept, let's go through the finer points. How Neon works Only calls made or received through the Neon app are recorded. Any conversations you have through the regular phone app on your iPhone or Android phone are excluded. Neon will pay you 30 cents per minute when you speak with another Neon user. In that case, both sides of the conversation are recorded. You'll get 15 cents per minute when you speak with a non-Neon user. Here, only your end of the call is recorded, or at least shared. You can earn up to $30 a day max by sharing your calls with Neon. The company will also dole out a $30 referral fee for each person you convince to use the app. Also: How Google's new AI model protects user privacy without sacrificing performance As for your privacy, Neon promises that it anonymizes your calls, which means it removes names, numbers, addresses, and other PII (personally identifiable information) before the calls are shared. The call recordings are encrypted and sold only to trusted and vetted AI companies, according to Neon. After you install and open the app, you're asked to share your phone number for verification purposes. You're then prompted to enter your first name and email address and agree to the terms and conditions. To dive in, you'd then make a phone call through Neon just as you would with any other calling app. To qualify, though, you have to follow certain rules. You must conduct a normal phone call, meaning genuine, two-way conversations. No long silent calls with no conversation, no putting your phone on speakerphone and not talking with the other person, and no playing pre-recorded audio. To get paid, you can cash out your earnings as soon as you score your first ten cents. After you redeem a payout, you'll typically get paid within three business days. Also: Tor browser's great - but for more complete privacy protection, you need to add this Based on the popularity of Neon, many people appear to be fine with this whole idea. You do have control over the process since only calls made through the app are recorded. Neon promises to anonymize the recordings and remove personal details. And I guess in this age of AI and social media, more people seem perfectly OK sharing private tidbits of their lives. Plus, many AIs already try to capture the natural language used in your chats to train themselves. So why not get paid for it? "Telecom companies are profiting off your data, and we think you deserve a cut," Neon says on its FAQ page. "With your consent, we process your call recordings, remove all personal info, and sell the anonymized audio to companies training AI." But I still ask the question: At what price, privacy? Do you really want some AI vacuuming up your personal phone calls, even with the data supposedly anonymous? Is that worth a few dollars a day? Those are just some of the questions you might want to ask yourself if you're thinking of giving Neon a shot. Want to follow my work? Add ZDNET as a trusted source on Google.