The new app, which records calls and offers audio payments, allows data to be sold to AI Companies, the No. 2 app in the social networking section of APILE’s US App Store.
The app, Neon Mobile, pitches itself as a money-making tool that offers “hundreds or thousands of dollars a year” to access audio conversations.
According to Neon’s website, the company says it will pay up to $30 per day, up to $30 per day to call other neon users and call others. The app also pays for referrals. According to data from app intelligence firm AppFigures, the app ranked No. 476 in the social networking category on the US App Store on September 18th, but jumped to No. 10 at the end of yesterday.
On Wednesday, Neon was at number two on the iPhone’s top free chart on social apps.
Neon also became the top overall app or game at No. 7 on Wednesday morning, becoming the top app at No. 6.
According to Neon’s terms of service, its mobile apps can capture users’ inbound and outbound phone calls. However, neon marketing claims to record only the call’s side unless it’s with another neon user.
That data is sold under the terms of service of “AI companies” and neon companies. “For the purposes of developing, training, testing and improving machine learning models, artificial intelligence tools and systems, and related technologies.”
The fact that such apps exist and are permitted in the app store indicates that AI shows the extent to which users’ lives and areas were once considered private. Meanwhile, high rankings within the Apple App Store prove that there are currently subsections of the market that appear willing to trade privacy for pennies, regardless of the greater cost to themselves or society.
Despite what is found in Neon’s Privacy Policy, the terms include a very extensive license to the user data Neon grants itself.
…worldwide, exclusive, irrevocable, transferable, royalty-free, fully paid right and license (with the right to sublicense through multiple tiers) to sell, use, host, store, transfer, publicly display, publicly perform (including by means of a digital audio transmission), communicate to the public, reproduce, modify for the purpose of formatting for display, create derivative works as authorized in these Terms, and distribute your Recordings, in whole or in Part, in any media format, and in any media channel, in each case, whether it is currently known or in the future developed.
It leaves plenty of room to shake up to do more with user data than neon claims.
The term also includes an extensive section on beta functionality. These are not guaranteed and may have any kind of issues or bugs.
Neon’s app raises many red flags, but it may be technically legal.
“Listing only one side of the phone is intended to avoid wiretapping,” Jennifer Daniels, a partner at the law firm’s Blank Roma privacy security & data protection group, tells TechCrunch.
“Under many state laws, in order to record it, you need to agree to the conversation from both parties… that’s an interesting approach,” says Daniels.
Peter Jackson, cybersecurity and privacy attorney for Greenberg Glusker, agrees, and tells TechCrunch that the language on “one-sided transcripts” sounds like it’s saying that neon records the user’s call in full, but that other parties may remove what they say from the final transcript.
Additionally, legal experts pointed to concerns about how data will actually be anonymized.
Neon claims to remove user names, emails and phone numbers before selling data to AI companies. However, the company does not say how AI partners and others who sell it may use that data. Voice data can be used to make fake calls that sound like they’re coming from you.
“If your voice goes over there, it can be used for scams,” Jackson says. “Now, this company has your phone number and essentially enough information. They have a recording of your voice. This can be used to create your spoof and do all sorts of scams.”
Even if the company itself is trustworthy, Neon does not disclose who the trustworthy partners are or that those entities are permitted to go further through the user’s data. Neon is subject to potential data breaches because it could be that of a company that has valuable data.
A brief test with TechCrunch showed that Neon was not recording a user’s call and did not warn call recipients. The app worked like other Voice-Over-IP apps, with Caller ID showing inbound phone numbers as usual. (Leave it to a security researcher to try to verify other claims in the app.)
Neon founder Alex Kiam did not reply to requests for comment.
Kiam, identified only as “Alex” on the company’s website, operates neon services from its New York apartment.
A LinkedIn post shows that Kiam raised money from Upfront Ventures for a startup a few months ago, but investors did not respond to inquiries from TechCrunch at the time of writing.
Has AI bleached users to privacy concerns?
There was a time when companies trying to profit from data collection via mobile apps handled this kind of thing in sly.
It was a scandal when it became clear in 2019 that Facebook was going to install an app to spy on teens. The following year, headlines roared once again when it was discovered that App Store Analytics providers had operated dozens of seemingly harmless apps to collect usage data about their mobile app ecosystem. There are regular warnings that VPN apps need to be vigilant, but this is often not as private as they claim. There are also government reports detailing how the government regularly purchases “commercially available” personal data in the market.
Currently, AI agents regularly attend meetings and take notes. But at least in that case, everyone agrees to the recording, Daniels told TechCrunch.
In light of this widespread use and the sale of personal data, there is enough irony to think that if the data is on sale anyway, they might benefit from it.
Unfortunately, they share more information than they noticed, and could potentially put other people’s privacy at risk.
“There’s certainly an incredible desire for knowledge workers, and frankly, everyone, to make it as easy as possible to do the job,” Jackson says. “And while some of these productivity tools obviously do it at the expense of your privacy, they are increasingly increasing the privacy of the people you interact with on a daily basis.”
