Meta to start capturing employee mouse movements, keystrokes for AI training

484 points by dlx 14 hours ago

Alt link: https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/meta-ai/articles/exclusive-meta-st...

This is going to be a huge chilling factor for employees. You’d no longer be able to disent, or discuss anything non-work related with even the slightest expectation of privacy.

Yes they could have accessed logs before but there’s a difference between directed checking after incidents and active surveillance at scale.

Blackthorn - 9 hours ago

Couldn't have happened to a more deserving group of people. My irony detector is sparking so badly I think it's about to blow.
- 2ndorderthought - 8 hours ago
  
  As much as it's funny to dunk on meta this type of surveillance is becoming the norm. Failed start ups are selling all their emails, chats, commits, etc for companies to train on. Most job offers now come with statements about how you don't have right to your likeness, or your personal network I think most people assume that's for photo ops, but ... Yea. I expect more and more of this. products and product features rolling out with this as a focus
  Companies have shown us that IP going to AI providers is acceptable. Once you cross that line your thought workers are assets not people.
  - j45 - 3 hours ago
    
    You never really owned what you typed or said at work in to their laptops, into their accounts using their software.
    
    pjerem - 2 hours ago
    
    Idk in the US but in France you are allowed to have personal data on your work computer.
    Though you have to label it as personal (like creating a « Personal » folder or label and your employer can still access it in case of suspicion but he must do it in your physical presence and accompanied with a witness, generally a representative of the employees.
    So you theoretically don’t have full privacy on this computer but you can’t be sanctioned for this usage.
    
    lanyard-textile - 2 hours ago
    
    I don't think we have sweeping regulations about it, at least in California.
    Most companies I've worked at have a policy of some "reasonable personal use" being permitted. The concern is usually focused on the other way around: Companies do not want their IP on your personal machines.
    They can certainly look at whatever is on their own machines, however, regardless if it is your personal data or not.
    One large caveat: If you do any work on your company's equipment, they may possibly own it, no matter how relevant it is to the company. It's one of the legal tests used to judge the ownership of your work.
    
    Der_Einzige - 6 minutes ago
    
    Stuff like this is why France has a ceiling on the market cap of GenAI companies it produces. Imagine if Huggingface/Mistral could fully operate in a low-regulation environment.
    Enjoy your red tape frogs. "Live to work" anglo protestant work ethic followers will complete the necessary economic destruction of rude "work to live" cheese eating surrender monkeys.
    This is our payback for Charles de Gaulle, Foucault, and Jacques Lacan (it's hard to rank these three based on damage done to western society)
    
    foepys - 2 hours ago
    
    Same in Germany, although the employer can forbid this but needs to do this explicitly. Most employers don't forbid personal data on work machines or using your work email for personal things.
    
    wiseowise - 5 minutes ago
    
    I mean, even if there’s no law to handle this it’s a pretty shitty thing to do, don’t you think?
    
    Gud - 2 hours ago
    
    Only because you live in a rigged economic system.
  - lynx97 - an hour ago
    
    Already 10 years ago, I got an email from a webshop I used to use once, informing me they were closing down. They'd happily sell the customer database to me, if I were interested. Mind you, they were so desperate that they made this offer to all their customers. Its anecdotal, and only tangentially related. But my point is, companies blatantly selling your data isn't exactly a new thing, and not really AI related either. They are doing this since a long time, but usually got less publicity.
- isodev - 2 hours ago
  
  I know right, so much pain and horror has been unleashed in the world by Meta… I have zero sympathy for their employees. Someone should’ve said no to developing this tech in the first place but here we are.
- gdhkgdhkvff - 8 hours ago
  
  This is a naive take on this. Do you think it stops with just metamates(lmao that’s what they call themselves) being surveilled? Nope. This is the exact type of thing that software IC’s should reject in solidarity. Being happy with BadCompanyX trampling employee expectations directly allows for GoodCompanyY to enact the same policies.
  - Blackthorn - 8 hours ago
    
    I'm happy to see the metamates (lol) receiving the same pain they inflict on others. Maybe it will teach them a lesson in solidarity.
    You can't have solidarity about a bad thing with the people who are doing the bad thing! They have to stop doing the bad thing first! That's how solidarity works!
    
    shimman - 7 hours ago
    
    Don't expect any solidarity to come from such people, they literally sold out humanity for slightly higher salaries. They made their beds, least they can do is feel bad.
  - wiseowise - 3 minutes ago
    
    > metamates
    It was metaapes, iirc.
  - JoshTriplett - 8 hours ago
    
    > This is the exact type of thing that software IC’s should reject in solidarity.
    Yes. Which includes quitting, en masse, from any company that does this.
    Meta ought to find it impossible to employ anyone with a policy like this.
    
    leptons - 8 hours ago
    
    Maybe in 2010 or 2015, but in 2026? Nobody is quitting their high paying job when the job market is this rough. A bubble has burst and there just are not the tech jobs out there that there used to be.
    And employers know this, so they are enacting all kinds of draconian policies because they know employees know that they can't just leave the job and also keep their families fed.
    
    ianbutler - 8 hours ago
    
    job market is 2019 levels this rhetoric is nice, but doesn't stack up. yes it's not 2021 levels which is where they over hired and hired a bunch of people they would not have hired before then.
    
    quadrifoliate - 7 hours ago
    
    This really depends on where you are. In the Bay Area it may be 2019 levels, in other parts of the country it is way worse than 2019.
    
    hx8 - 7 hours ago
    
    The tech job market was about 2019 levels a year ago. It's materially worse now.
    
    leptons - 4 hours ago
    
    We are at 2001 dot-com bubble burst levels now, as far as I'm concerned.
    
    gdhkgdhkvff - 6 hours ago
    
    If only there was some way where workers in this profession could form some type of JOIN(but like a vertical version?) between different sets of workers, even crossing company boundaries, so that workers could coordinate to ensure that everyone would be quitting at once, and therefore have any power at all to block anti-worker edicts.
    
    simpaticoder - 4 hours ago
    
    So, like an intersection of workers?
- itake - 2 hours ago
  
  My ex-employer (non-FANGA, but still over $10b mkt cap) started using similar software.
- bsilvereagle - 8 hours ago
  
  There are large organizations at Meta focused on basic research & design (FAIR, Open Compute, PyTorch, etc) and giving back to the community. Not everyone is maximizing revenue.
  - resident423 - 8 hours ago
    
    There are also large organizations at Meta focussed on the optimal distribution of scam ads to the elderly.
    https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...
  - dlev_pika - 8 hours ago
    
    I guess Palantir is cool as long as they keep the queer interest group going
  - Teever - 8 hours ago
    
    Like all of us these people make a cost-benefit analysis when it comes to their choice of employer and how much it suits their purposes and personal priorities like giving back to the community.
    This is just another factor they’ll have to grapple with in their analysis.
    I’m sure some of them will find it a bridge too far but not enough to really matter. The work will continue as will the expansion of Meta and the negative externalities that it produces.
JuniperMesos - 8 hours ago

I already assume that on a work computer everything I'm doing could be monitored by work IT. At every job I've had, I've made a point of not using work hardware for anything I even remotely thought someone at the job might object to. Instead I use my own hardware for that kind of thing - I own a smartphone, I own multiple computers, this is not hard to do.
When I worked at a startup that had some internal conflict between the software engineers and management, someone made a Signal group to chat about the issues among the software engineers privately and everyone joined that group with their own Signal accounts, without any kind of issue.
- catcowcostume - 5 hours ago
  
  > Yes they could have accessed logs before but there’s a difference between directed checking after incidents and active surveillance at scale.
  - JuniperMesos - 3 hours ago
    
    Not really from the perspective of my own risk/reward calculation. I don't know in advance what's going to be considered an "incident" that will make corporate IT suddenly want to search my work computer. Better to simply have a policy of never using a computer my work controls for personal data, especially when I already have my own computers for that that I use regardless of what job I happen to be working at.
    
    johntash - 2 hours ago
    
    Keep in mind this isn't just about personal data on work hardware. It also leads to things like "we noticed you didn't move your mouse or type anything for 45 minutes, what were you doing?" type of micromanagement.
everdrive - 12 hours ago

Yes, but I cannot imagine Meta cares about chilling their employees. They're deep into the "extract more value" phase and are no longer bringing in the cutting edge talent.
- stringfood - 12 hours ago
  
  at this point employees should be kept in cold storage to acclimate so as to prevent being shocked from any more chilling announcements. also will cut down on bathroom breaks
PradeetPatel - 11 hours ago

Tbh that's to be expected, the work machine is the company's property and there shouldn't be any expectation of privacy.
I work at a tech firm in India, and we are encouraged to create skills.md based on the traits of our colleagues, with the intention of reducing key personnel risk. A handful of engineers were let go as the result of a re-alignment, and their AI counterparts are actively maintaining their code.
I wonder if this is where they are going.
- Frieren - 10 minutes ago
  
  > Tbh that's to be expected, the work machine is the company's property and there shouldn't be any expectation of privacy.
  > I work at a tech firm in India
  First I wondered how can you have such a low expectation on privacy, then you answered my question. What you need in India is more unionization and fight against corruption. It is becoming worse here in Europe but in India you do not have the protections that we have. Without that you will have no rights.
  You will have to fights to get rights at your job. In the same way that Europeans are going to have to fight to keep them.
- piker - 11 hours ago
  
  > A handful of engineers were let go as the result of a re-alignment, and their AI counterparts are actively maintaining their code.
  Feel like I'm reading a Gibson novel here.
  - lazide - 8 hours ago
    
    Hint: it’s also fiction
    
    PradeetPatel - 7 hours ago
    
    I wish. Check out colleagues.ai as the Chinese equivalent of the programme.
    
    lazide - 4 hours ago
    
    If that actually replaces your coworker, I feel sorry for everyone.
- jaapz - 11 hours ago
  
  There shouldn't be any expectation of privacy? There absolutely should!
  - ryandrake - 7 hours ago
    
    Whether they should or shouldn't, you have to expect that your company has root on your work device or at least some sort of corporate admin profile that gives them access to everything on the device and all attached peripherals. This has been pretty standard at IT / tech companies for as long as I've been in the workforce. I personally wouldn't do anything personal on a work computer, from sending personal E-mails all the way up to storing nudes on it. Why do that when a separate personal computer is cheap and solves the problem entirely?
    EDIT: I remember, an example of this actually came up a while ago on HN. An Apple employee had to return a device unwiped, due to legal discovery, but the device had intimate pictures on it[1]. Oops! Don't do that, people.
    1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28241917
  - satvikpendem - 11 hours ago
    
    On a work computer? No there shouldn't and isn't.
    
    whateverboat - 10 hours ago
    
    This is Stockholm syndrome. Sure, you can enforce zero privacy on work computers, it will just lead to shitty work culture and lowered productivity.
    
    satvikpendem - 10 hours ago
    
    [flagged]
    
    cyclopeanutopia - 10 hours ago
    
    > employee communications are already monitored everywhere
    proof?
    > Turns out people actually don't really care about privacy at work
    lol, won't ask for proof, because it's trivially falsifiable
    
    satvikpendem - 9 hours ago
    
    Ask your IT department what they're tracking and they'll tell you. And yet I assume you still continue to go to work or do not actively seek out non-surveiling companies. By "everybody," maybe iI should clarify that it’s "majority" instead.
    
    Liskni_si - 9 hours ago
    
    What if "the IT department" is just this one guy who asks me to Cc him an invoice when I buy a laptop and that's the end of it?
    (yes that's a real story from my career, and the company was 100+ employees at the time)