A new app offering to record your phone calls and pay you for the audio so it can sell the data to AI companies is, unbelievably, the No. 2 app in Apple’s U.S. App Store’s Social Networking section.
The app, Neon Mobile, pitches itself as a money-making tool offering “hundreds or even thousands of dollars per year” for access to your audio conversations.
Neon’s website says the company pays 30¢ per minute when you call other Neon users and up to $30 per day maximum for making calls to anyone else. The app also pays for referrals. The app first ranked No. 476 in the Social Networking category of the U.S. App Store on September 18, but jumped to No. 10 at the end of yesterday, according to data from app intelligence firm Appfigures.
On Wednesday, Neon was spotted in the No. 2 position on the iPhone’s top free charts for social apps.
Neon also became the No. 7 top overall app or game earlier on Wednesday morning, and became the No. 6 top app.
According to Neon’s terms of service, the company’s mobile app can capture users’ inbound and outbound phone calls. However, Neon’s marketing claims to only record your side of the call unless it’s with another Neon user.
That data is being sold to “AI companies,” the company’s terms of service state, “for the purpose of developing, training, testing, and improving machine learning models, artificial intelligence tools and systems, and related technologies.”
Image Credits:Neon Mobile
The fact that such an app exists and is permitted on the app stores is an indication of how far AI has encroached into users’ lives and areas once thought of as private. Its high ranking within the Apple App Store, meanwhile, is proof that there is now some subsection of the market seemingly willing to exchange their privacy for pennies, regardless of the larger cost to themselves or society.
Despite what Neon’s privacy policy says, its terms include a very broad license to its user data, where Neon grants itself a:
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