If you have not heard the word Neon In the last 24 hours, it is because you have not been much connected to the Internet, since this app has become viral in a few hours, due to its new way of making users earn money without effort.
However, all this reduced our privacy, since it was Sell our calls To that company to train an AI with them. This is something legal, as long as we accept. However, a gap has been discovered that changes everything.
What is Neon and what happened to you?
In just a few days Neon Mobile (an app that paid users to record their calls and sell those audios to artificial intelligence companies) became a sensation in the App Store: Top 10 on the free and second list in the social category. But that ascent was stopped since the application has been temporarily withdrawn after discovering a Severe security gap that allowed access to telephone numbers, recordings and transcripts of other users.
Techcrunch's investigation, which uncovered the ruling, shows that it was not necessary to be an expert to exploit it: the reporters were able to intercept records of their own calls and then force the neon server to deliver information from third parties. That is, complete metadata (user number, contact number, time, duration and how much they paid each call) were available to anyone who knew how to ask for them.
The most worrying thing is that among the filtered calls there were quite murky situations: there were users who, in order to earn more money, came to record people around them without asking permission. That not only highlights a serious technical failure, but also opens the door to an important ethical and legal mess.
After being notified by journalists, Founder Alex Kiam decided to remove Neon from the store and send an email to users. In it he assured that the app would be “temporarily offline” to reinforce security, although he avoided clearly recognizing the magnitude of the filtration. Meanwhile, neither Apple nor Google had spoken, which leaves in the air if the application will work again someday.
The conclusion is simple: projects that play with personal data can take off very fast, but an oversight is enough in their design so that trust collapses. If you were a neon user, the sensible thing is to check what you shared and be aware of any official notice.
Therefore, if you got make some money With it, we are glad, but it is not a very legal way to do so, since we will always try to take advantage of more based on unusual methods, so, on our part, we believe that we will not see it again, although it is never known, they just change the method and get something that serves us all.
And you, what do you think of all this? Do you think it is fine to earn money selling our privacy, or is it something that should not even allow us? Leave us a comment with your opinion.
