App Pays Users to Record Their Voice Calls
App Pays Users to Record Their Voice Calls
Submitted by John Lister on Tue, 10/07/2025 - 11:21
A new app with an unusual function, Neon Mobile, has surged in popularity to become the number two social app on Apple's US App Store. The app pays users for recordings of their phone calls, which are then sold to artificial intelligence companies.
The idea is to capture real examples of both what people say in conversations and the way they speak. This could power both language generating models and those which produce spoken audio.
How Users Earn Money
Neon reportedly pays users 30 cents per minute for calls made to other Neon users and 15 cents per minute for calls to anyone else, with a maximum payout of $30 per day.
The company says that it only records the user's side of the conversation unless the other party is also a Neon user, an approach some legal experts believe is designed to navigate wiretap laws. Many states have laws that say it's illegal to record both sides of a conversation without the consent of both parties. (Source: techtimes.com)
Data Privacy and User Rights
The data collected is sold to AI firms for the purpose of training and improving machine learning models. While Neon claims to remove personal identifiers, its terms of service grant the company an "exclusive, irrevocable, transferable, royalty-free" license to the recordings.
This allows the company to use, sell, modify, and distribute the voice data in any media format. Privacy attorneys have raised concerns that this voice data could potentially be used to create impersonations for fraudulent activities, and it remains unclear which partner companies are receiving the data or how they might use it. (Source: pcmag.com)
It's also not entirely clear how the recordings work when only one party is using the app: specifically, whether Neon literally only records the audio one side, or if it records the entire conversation but discards the other party's voice from the transcription process.
What's Your Opinion?
Would you be willing to trade recordings of your phone calls for a daily payment? Do app stores have a responsibility to vet the privacy implications of the apps they host? What are the long-term societal risks of selling personal voice data to AI companies?
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Comments
Big Brother is Always Watching
Remember when people complained about Windows XP's Most Recently Used (MRU) files showing up in the Start Menu? The MRU list was a way of tracking and displaying the documents and programs you opened most recently - a convenience feature that often ended up exposing your private activity to anyone who shared the computer. Compared to today's level of data collection and behavioral tracking, those old MRU privacy concerns pale in comparison.
Rush to AI everywhere
If AI is doing the jobs that people "were" getting paid for, where will the money come from to pay for goods and services when people are no longer working or needed? AI can work 24 hours a day, seven days a week with no holidays, for the cost of electricity. I have seen robot machines assembling machinery that was once put together by workers. This was over almost 10 years ago traveling to various factories as a forklift repair technician. I worked on electric forklifts and some of these were unmanned using laser guided technology.
Rush to AI
When AI/mech does all work, everything will be as cheap as chips.
The Trillionaires will realise they still need people to buy stuff, so they will have to give us ALL a UBI. The more money they want, the more they will have to give us!
The only limits will be how much they wish to produce. Money may become a bit meaningless. Everybody may just be GIVEN what they NEED (as decided by the government) but will have all the spare time they could ever dream of.
Spare time
Spare time to do what? :) I am aware that many work very long hours now. Some work by choice and others work by necessity, but who gets to do what with the spare time that they will have? Why would trillionaires give us UBI? That would make them non-trillionares.
recording phone calls!
I won't even allow my own financial company to record my voice for logging in. That was offered about the time there were articles on scammers using voice recordings to scam money, usually from older people! My mother almost fell for one that was the "grandparent" scam! Be alert whatever age you are! The bad guys stay 2 steps ahead of us.