Earlier this year, Anker, the Chinese company that manufactures EUFY cameras, offered its users ’money in exchange for videos of packages and car theft.
The famous safety camera maker on the Internet She said that she would pay her customers 2 dollars for each video to train artificial intelligence systems To help discover thieves who steal cars and beams better.
The company wrote on its website: “To ensure that we have sufficient data, we are looking for videos for each of the real events and stage, to help the AL training what he should search for.”
“You can even create events by pretending to be a thief and donate these events,” says the site. “You can complete this quickly. Perhaps one verb can be taken with two outdoor cameras simultaneously, making it effective and easy. If you also regulate the stealing of the car door, you may earn $ 80.”
Eofy also wrote that “the data collected from these interim events is used only to train our algorithms and not for any other purposes.”
This initiative shows that companies are ready to pay for user data who believe it can be useful for training artificial intelligence models. Although this gives some users the ability to obtain value from their own data, there are safety and privacy risks.
An example of this: Last week, Techcrunch found that neon, Viral contact application The money was offered to the users ready to share the records and the texts of their calls, He had a safety defect that allowed users to access any other user data. After alerting it from the security break, Neon went to a non -contact mode.
Hundreds of thousands of “donated” videos to train artificial intelligence
The EUFY $ 2 campaign was played for each video of the theft videos from December 18, 2024 to February 25, 2025. More than 120 users responded to the campaign advertising page saying they participated in, according to the comments that users published there.
The company’s goal was to collect 20,000 video clips, each of the packages of beams and “pulling the doors of cars”. Eofy users can participate by filling Google Model They can download their Paypal videos and account for payment.
EUFY did not respond to Techcrunch requests for comment and our questions, such as the number of users who participated in the campaign, the number of funds paid by these users, the number of videos collected by the company, and whether the company deleted the videos collected after training its AI systems.
Since then, EUFY has similar campaigns aimed at motivating its customers to send videos to train artificial intelligence.
As of the time of publication, through another campaign in the application, EUFY is called the video donation program to improve its AI systems, Eofy also offers users with rewards ranging from a “trainee medal”, which seems to be just a badge next to the application, to gifts such as cameras or gift cards.
Eofy only requests videos that include humans for this campaign.
EUFY also shows the “Honor Wall” that classifies users who donated the largest video events. The arrangement leader donated 201,531 video, according to the application.
On the application page for the donation program, EUFY explains that “the donated videos are used only for training and improvement. EUFY will not provide video to third parties.”
EUFY too Ask users to donate Registered videos with children’s screens in the company. Support page that separates the steps to share videos do not mention any money reward for these videos.
He did not respond when asked about this particular initiative.
There are reasons for skepticism about EUFY obligations to protect user privacy. In 2023, The drilling was revealed The company tried to cover up the flow of user cameras, which the company announced as encrypted from one side to the tip, which was not coded upon access to its web gate.
After going and forth with the technical news site, ANKER admitted that he had misled users and promised to fix the problem.
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