At the start of this 12 months, Anker, who produces Chinese firms that produce Eufy monitoring cameras, offered its users money in exchange for videos of package and automobile theft.
The popular web -connected surveillance camera manufacturer said it will pay its customers $ 2 per video to coach his AI systems To higher recognize thieves, steal cars and packages.
“To be certain that we have now enough data, we’re on the lookout for videos of each real and staged events to coach the AL, based on which we will keep the search for the lookout,” wrote the corporate on its website.
“You may even create events by specifying to be a thief and donate these events,” says the web site. “You can complete this quickly. Perhaps an act will be recorded by your two outdoor cameras at the identical time, which makes it efficient and straightforward. If you furthermore may integrate a automobile door theft, chances are you’ll earn 80 US dollars.”
Eufy also wrote that “the information collected by these staged events are used exclusively for the training of our AL algorithms and never for other purposes.”
This initiative shows that firms are willing to pay to receive the information of the users that they will be useful to coach their AI models. This gives some users the chance to get value out of their very own data, but there are safety and data protection risks.
A typical example: Last week Techcrunch found that Neon, a viral app app that offered money to share records and transcripts of their calls, had a security error with which users could access the information of one other user. After Neon had been made aware of the safety theater, he went offline.
Hundreds of hundreds of videos “donated” to coach the AI
The Eufy campaign with 2 US dollars per video for theft videos ran from December 18, 2024 to February 25, 2025. More than 120 users answered on the campaign's announcement that that they had been posted by the users.
The company's goal was to gather 20,000 videos of parcel thefts and “pulling of automobile doors”. Eufy users could participate by filling out A Google form where they were capable of upload videos and their PayPal account for payment.
Eufy didn’t reply to the inquiries from Techcrunch for comments and our questions, equivalent to:
Since then, Eufy has had similar campaigns that aim to get its customers to send videos to coach their AI.
At the time of publication, Eufy offers one other in-app campaign that calls Eufy the video donation program to enhance its AI systems, users also rewards that range from an “apprenticeship medal” that simply a badge along with the name of the user within the app, to gifts equivalent to cameras or gift cards.
Eufy only asks for videos that affect people for this campaign.
The Eufy app also shows a “honor wall” that users manage who donated a lot of the video events. According to the app, the top of the top of the rank donated 201,531 videos.
On the app for the donation program, Eufy makes it clear that “donated videos are only used for AL training and improvement. Eufy won’t provide the video to 3rd parties.”
So eufy asks users to donate Videos recorded with the corporate's baby monitors. On the support page on which the steps to exchange the videos are described, no money reward is mentioned for these videos.
Eufy didn’t answer when he was asked about this special initiative.
There are reasons to doubt Eufy's obligations to guard the privacy of users. In 2023, The verge unveiled It was unencrypted that the corporate tried to cover up the users' camera streams for which the corporate was advertised as an end-to-end encryption when it was accessed via his web portal.
After a backwards and forwards with the Tech News site, anchor admitted that she was misleading the users and promised to repair the issue.
