Earlier this year, Anker, the Chinese company that makes EUFY security cameras, offered its users’ money in exchange for car packages and car thefts.
The popular security camera manufacturer connected to the internet said she would pay her customers of $ 2 per video to train AI systems to help better detect thieves stealing cars and packages.
“To ensure that we have enough data, we are looking for videos of real and gradual events, to help educate Al for what should be on the alert,” the company writes on its website.
“You can still create events, pretending to be a thief and donated these events,” the site says. “You can complete it quickly. Maybe an act can be captured by your two outdoor cameras at the same time, making it effective and easy. If you also steal car door, you can earn $ 80”.
Eufy also wrote that “the data collected from these gradual events are used exclusively for the training of al -algorithms and not for other purposes”.
This initiative shows that companies are willing to pay to get the data of users who believe they can be useful to train their AI models. While this gives some users the opportunity to gain value from their own data, there are risks of safety and privacy.
Case: Last week, TechCrunch found that NEON, an application for a viral call that offered money to users wishing to share registrations and transfers of their calls, had a security defect that allowed users to access another user data. After being notified of the security delay, Neon went offline.
Hundreds of thousands of “donation” videos to train AI
The EUFY campaign that offers $ 2 per video for video theft ran from December 18, 2024 to February 25, 2025. More than 120 users responded to the campaign announcement page saying they participated in it, according to comments posted by users there.
The company’s goal was to collect 20,000 videos on each package theft and “pull the doors of the car”. EUFY users could participate by filling in A Google form where they could upload videos and their paypal account for payment.
Eufy did not respond to TechCrunch’s requests for comments and questions, such as the number of users participated in the campaign, how much money paid users, how many videos the company collected and whether the company deleted the collected videos after training AI systems.
Since then, EUFY has had similar campaigns aimed at providing incentives for its customers to send videos to train their AI.
From the time of publication, through another in -application campaign, Eufy calls on the video donation program to improve AI systems, Eufy also offers rewards ranging from a “apprentice medal”, which merely appears a signal next to the user name in the application, in gifts such as cameras or cards.
Eufy only calls for videos that include people for this campaign.
The Eufy app also shows a “price wall” that classifies users who have donated most video events. The leader of the ranking has donated 201.531 videos, according to the application.
On the app page for the donation program, EUFY clarifies that “video donation is used only to train and improve Al. EUFY will not provide the video to third parties”.
Eufy too asks users to donate The videos recorded with the company’s baby screens. The support page detailing the steps to share the videos does not mention any money reward for these videos.
Eufy did not respond when asked about this particular initiative.
There are reasons to question EUFY’s commitments to protect the privacy of users. In 2023, Verge revealed That the company attempted to cover users’ camera flows, which the company was advertised as end -to -end encrypted, was not encrypted when it had access through the tissue gate.
After a back-and-forth with the Tech News website, Anker admitted that he was misled by users and promised to correct the issue.
This article was originally published on October 1st.
