Neon, the No. 2 social app on the Apple App Store, pays users to record their phone calls and sells data to AI firms (techcrunch.com)

Neon Mobile, a new app that surged to No. 2 in Apple’s U.S. App Store Social category, pays users (about $0.30/min for Neon-to-Neon calls, up to $30/day) to capture their phone-call audio and sells those recordings to “AI companies” for “developing, training, testing, and improving” machine-learning models. Its terms grant the company a sweeping, worldwide, transferable, royalty‑free license to use, modify, sublicense and distribute recordings, and the app claims to record only the user’s side of calls (unless both parties use Neon) — a possible legal tactic to sidestep two‑party consent wiretap laws. Neon also promises removal of obvious identifiers but discloses little about buyers, downstream uses, or how “de‑identification” is performed; TechCrunch found no clear in‑call warning to recipients. For the AI/ML community this is consequential: raw, real-world voice data is extremely valuable for TTS, speaker modeling, voice cloning and other audio models, but data with murky consent/provenance and broad licensing creates ethical, legal and security risks — from enabling realistic deepfakes and fraud to contaminating training sets with improperly licensed content. The episode underscores urgent needs for stricter provenance and consent verification, transparent buyer practices, technical mitigations (watermarking, provenance metadata, differential privacy), and policy guidance so practitioners and platforms don’t normalize monetizing private conversations as a training-data pipeline.