A new app, Neon Mobile, has surged to the number two spot in the U.S. Apple App Store’s Social Networking category with a startlingly direct proposition: it pays users to record their phone calls and sells the audio data to artificial intelligence companies. The app’s rapid ascent highlights a growing and controversial market for personal data to train AI models.
The Business of Voice Data
Neon pitches itself as a money-making tool, offering users payments of up to 30¢ per minute for calls made to other Neon users and a daily maximum of $30 for calls to anyone else. In exchange, the company harvests the audio from these conversations. According to its terms of service, this data is explicitly sold to AI companies “for the purpose of developing, training, testing, and improving machine learning models, artificial intelligence tools and systems.”
Navigating Legal and Privacy Gray Areas
The app’s business model raises immediate and significant privacy concerns. While Neon claims to only record the user’s side of a call—a tactic likely aimed at circumventing two-party consent wiretap laws—legal experts express skepticism about this method and its effectiveness. Furthermore, the company’s terms grant it a “worldwide, exclusive, irrevocable, transferable, royalty-free” license to sell, distribute, and create derivative works from user recordings. This broad language gives Neon extensive control over sensitive voice data, which experts warn could be used for fraud, voice impersonation, or creating synthetic AI voices without further user consent.
The Broader Implications for the MENA Region
As a globally available application, Neon’s rise is a significant development for the MENA market. With high mobile penetration and a rapidly growing interest in AI across the region, such apps could gain traction quickly among users looking for new income streams. This serves as a critical case study for MENA-based regulators, founders, and consumers about the new frontier of data monetization and the ethical questions it poses. The emergence of apps like Neon underscores the need for clear regulations and user awareness regarding data privacy as the region’s own AI ecosystem develops, especially concerning how local data protection laws in countries like the UAE and Saudi Arabia would apply to such practices.
About Neon Mobile
Neon Mobile is a mobile application that financially compensates users for allowing their phone calls to be recorded. The collected audio data is then sold to third-party artificial intelligence companies to be used as training material for developing and refining AI models and systems.
Source: TechCrunch
