This app will pay you $30/day to record your phone calls for AI - but is it worth it? (www.zdnet.com)

Neon is a new calling app that pays users to record phone conversations for AI training: $0.30 per minute when both parties use Neon (both sides recorded) and $0.15 per minute when only the caller uses Neon (only your side recorded), with a $30/day earnings cap and a $30 referral bonus. Users sign up with phone, name and email, must place calls through the app, follow rules for “real” two‑way conversations (no long silent calls, prerecorded audio, or staged interactions), and can cash out after earning $0.10, typically receiving payment within three business days. Neon says recordings are encrypted, PII (names, numbers, addresses) is stripped, and audio is sold only to vetted AI buyers; the app is already climbing App Store charts. For the AI/ML community this is significant because it creates a direct, large-scale pipeline of natural, colloquial phone audio — potentially valuable for speech recognition, conversational models, speaker diarization and context-aware dialogue systems. Technically, one-sided vs two-sided recordings, the claimed anonymization steps, and metadata availability will affect data utility and model behavior. It also raises practical and ethical implications: anonymization can be imperfect (voiceprints and contextual clues can re-identify speakers), consent and cross-jurisdictional wiretap laws vary, and monetizing personal conversations shifts data-collection norms. Users and researchers should weigh the training-value of real-world audio against privacy, legal and bias risks before embracing this model.