Social app Neon pays users to record their phone calls, sells data to AI firms (finance.yahoo.com)

Neon Mobile, a rapidly climbing social app on Apple’s U.S. App Store, pays users to record their phone calls and sells the audio to “AI companies” for training and testing machine‑learning models. Neon’s site advertises roughly $0.30 per minute for calls between Neon users and up to $30/day for calls to anyone; its terms permit capturing inbound and outbound calls and grant Neon a sweeping, worldwide, royalty‑free license to sell, modify, sublicense and distribute users’ recordings. The company claims it records only a user’s side of a call (to sidestep wiretap laws) and strips obvious identifiers before sale, but TechCrunch testing showed no participant notifications and legal experts warn the “one‑sided” language could mask broader capture. The story is significant because it exposes how voice data — deeply personal and uniquely tied to identity — is becoming a commercial commodity for AI training. Neon’s broad TOS, lack of partner disclosure, and ambiguous anonymization raise concrete risks: voice cloning, impersonation fraud, unpredictable downstream uses by buyers, and expanded attack surface if data is breached. That this model has reached top App Store rankings also suggests growing consumer willingness to trade privacy for cash, and underscores regulatory, legal and ethical gaps as AI firms increasingly rely on cheaply acquired real‑world audio to build models.