Earlier this year, the anchor, the Chinese company, which makes the Eutter Security camera, offered its users in exchange for package and car theft videos.
Popular internet-connected security camera manufacturer Said that it will pay $ 2 per video to its customers to train their AI system To help better detection of thieves who steal cars and packages.
The company wrote on its website, “To ensure that we have enough data, we are looking for videos of both real and staging events, so that Al can help train Al.”
“You can also create events by pretending to be a thief and donating those events,” reads the website. “You can complete it quickly. Maybe an act can be captured simultaneously by your two outdoor cameras, making it efficient and easy. If you also staging car door theft, you can earn $ 80.”
Eufy has also written that “data collected from these staged events is used only to train our algorithms, not for any other purposes.”
This initiative suggests that companies are ready to pay users’ data to obtain data that they think may be useful to train their AI model. While it gives some users the ability to get value from their own data, protection and privacy risk.
Case in point: Last week, Techcrunch found that neon, a viral calling app, which offered to users to recording and their call tapes, offered money designed to share tapes, was a safety defect that allowed users to reach another user’s data. After the safety lapse became alert, the neon became offline.
Hundreds of thousands of videos of ‘donation’ to train AI
Eufy’s campaign lasted from December 18, 2024 to 25 February 2025 for the video of theft. More than 120 users responded to the announcement page of the campaign, stating that they participated in it, in which they participated in it.
The company aims to collect 20,000 videos in each of each of the package theft and each of the “car doors pull”. Euffy users can participate by filling A Google Form Where they can upload videos for payment and their PayPal account.
Euffy did not respond to the requests of Techcrunch for comments and our questions, such as how many users participated in the campaign, how much money they gave to those users, how many videos the company collected, and whether the company removed the video collected after training its AI system.
Since then, Euffy has the same campaign aimed at encouraging their customers to send videos to their customers to train their AI.
As at the time of publication, through another in-app campaign, which calls the video donation program to improve its Euffy AI system, also provides euffy users ranging from “Apprentice Medals” to rewards, which is a badge next to the user’s name in the app, such as gifts such as camera or gift cards.
Euffy is only asking for videos related to humans for this campaign.
The Eufy app also shows a “Honor Wall” that ranks users who have donated the most video events. According to the app, the ranking leader has donated 201,531 videos.
In the page of the app for the donation program, Eufy clarifies that “donated videos are used only for training and improvement. Euffy will not provide video to third party.”
Eufy too Asks users to donate Video recorded with the company’s baby monitor. The support page that describes steps to share video does not refer to any money reward for these videos.
When asked about this special initiative, Eufy did not respond.
The users are due to doubting the commitments of Eufy to protect privacy of users. In 2023, Find out from the verge The company tried to cover the camera stream of users that the company advertised as End-to-end encrypted, was unknown when accessed through its web portal.
After taking back and forth with the tech news site, the anchor admitted that he misled users and promised to correct the issue.
This article was originally published on 1 October.
