Anker offered Eufy camera owners $2 per theft video for AI training (techcrunch.com)

Anker’s Eufy division ran a campaign offering users $2 per video of package or car-theft events to train its AI, open to both real and staged incidents. The drive (Dec 18, 2024–Feb 25, 2025) solicited uploads via a Google Form (with PayPal payments), aimed to collect 20,000 videos each of package thefts and “pulling car doors,” and explicitly encouraged staged reenactments. Eufy said donated footage would be used only for AI training and not shared with third parties; its app also runs a broader “Video Donation Program” with badges, gifts and an “Honor Wall” — the top contributor reportedly uploaded 201,531 events. The company did not answer questions about how many clips it actually collected, payouts made, or whether footage was deleted after training. The initiative follows past privacy concerns—Eufy was flagged in 2023 for misrepresenting end-to-end encryption—and echoes other cases (e.g., Neon) where paid data-collection programs exposed security lapses. For AI/ML practitioners, this episode underscores both opportunity and risk: real-world incident footage is valuable for improving detection models, but incentivizing staged events and crowd-sourced uploads introduces label noise, selection bias, and potential adversarial examples. The scale and sensitive nature of the data amplify re-identification, retention, and consent risks, stressing the need for secure ingestion pipelines, transparent provenance and deletion policies, rigorous validation of labeled data, and fair compensation/ethics practices when monetizing user-generated training data.