Meta Pauses Employee-Tracking Program Following Internal Data Leak
wired.com161 points by 1vuio0pswjnm7 5 hours ago
161 points by 1vuio0pswjnm7 5 hours ago
Meta continuing to be the most shameless (and shameful to work for) company around.
I can't think of a single product of theirs that hasn't made the world a markedly worse place. Even their recent hardware foray is managing to find a way to ruin trust in everyday interactions (guys filming drunk girls with Ray Bans, surveillance, etc.).
Have several friends at the more 'thoughtful' frontier labs that bin meta applicants straight to the trash for this very reason.
> I can't think of a single product of theirs that hasn't made the world a markedly worse place
zstd
I’m torn about React and PyTorch :)
They author thousands of open-source. Nobody would consider those 'products' (though feel free to play pedantic). And many would argue React did far more harm than good.
> zstd
Yes, but also “damning with faint praise” immediately comes to mind
I've avoided react as much as I could. Maintained a high paying frontend career without react until a year or so ago, when I was forced by management to start using it. Thankfully AI was able to touch it for me while I pinched my nose.
Facebook, for instance, made a lot of money for shareholders, which we know is the same thing as making the world a better place.
Meta is a golden jail for one teenager who cannot grow up no matter what he does. Shame.
Not to defend him, but there are actually quite a lot of people who can’t or won’t grow up.
What’s your point? There’s a lot of people who can’t or won’t do a lot of things.
Seeing how much damage he does as it is, I don't want to know the grown-up version.
Back in the day... 2004-2005 facebook was amazing. Spread like wildfire, and lots of fun to use. Just you and your college friends, and their friends.
Even the original idea (if The Social Network is a trustworthy source) was copied -- Zuckerberg just has a complete lack of vision, but is clearly an intelligent operator with good business sense. Jagged intelligence, like an LLM.
What are these "thoughtful" frontier labs you speak of? I see Meta folks going to the big ones all the time. Ton of former PyTorch/Inductor folks now are at Ant/TM etc.
Everyone I know in the GPU compiler/GPGPU space seems to be either going to meta or leaving meta for NV or some AI lab. My anecdotal observations don't align with "bin meta applicants straight to the trash."
Portal was pretty good and an originalish product
Spy on your grand parents from the convenience of your kitchen counter top!
now in arctic white!
Why did they discontinue that? It was a very good product; we got them for all the grandparents and they worked really well at bringing the family together across distance. Could have fit in so well with WhatsApp too. But then they just killed it.
Shareholders didn't like it. At the end of the day Meta is an advertising company so everything they do must be in service of increasing revenue from advertising.
Valve is a different company.
I hope there’s a day where collectively the money is no longer enough and reason and good will prevails so that Meta can crumble to dust while I am alive; but doubtful that day will ever come.
They dont need frontier labs. Meta's dashboard jockeys get paid the same
Nitpick: Facebook bought WhatsApp, it didn't make it.
They've also largely made WhatsApp worse.
How so? Most of the hardcore encryption stuff was built at Facebook under the founder's supervision afaik for the purposes of making it harder for Zuck to inevitably ruin the privacy aspects.
I personally don't use it, because it _is_ loaded with engagement bait but its not all worse and is better in some ways.
Reconning. We made it so Zuck had plausible deniability for all the bad shit happening on WA as a direct result of anticipated regulatory pressure.
There is no “make things harder for the dictator” at Meta/Fb and never has been.
They added ads, an "AI companion", and backdoor logging of all chat messages
That last one’s going to need some substantiation.
“In the ordinary course of providing our service, WhatsApp does not store messages once they are delivered or transaction logs of such delivered messages. Undelivered messages are deleted from our servers after 30 days. As stated in the WhatsApp Privacy Policy, we may collect, use, preserve, and share user information if we have a good-faith belief that it is reasonably necessary to (a) keep our users safe, (b) detect, investigate, and prevent illegal activity, (c) respond to legal process, or to government requests, (d) enforce our Terms and policies. This may include information about how some users interact with others on our service. We also offer end-to-end encryption for our services, which is always activated. End-to-end encryption means that messages are encrypted to protect against WhatsApp and third parties from reading them.” (https://faq.whatsapp.com/444002211197967)
I believe it was the automatic unencrypted weekly data upload to Google Drive
Where should we work instead?
I’d really like to leave, but I’m kind of stuck, and I don’t have enough to retire.
I have to work remote from a non-coast state for family care reasons, and the places I’ve interviewed at the last few months have balked at hiring a remote employee.
Your options are:
1. Find another job 2. Don’t find another job
You can’t say “where else can I work” like you have no agency over your life. Everyone chooses every day to do what they do that day.
You don’t get to be morally absolved because you’re choosing the easy path and you’re “stuck”. I’m sure there are plenty of places that pay less that would love to have talented remote employees.
The key point here is the “pay less” part. I know people that have turned down offers from meta that would 5x their salary and their personal situation would notably improve from at least some of that extra cash.
The OP is a bit preachy and maybe some employees really don’t have any other options even with accepting lower salaries, but the majority should at least realise the golden handcuffs their bound by even if they choose not to act on them.
I don't blame someone for working at facebook, but I don't think most of you realize how cash money a FANG company looks on your resume to IT managers at the lowly normal companies. Go work in financial services, insurance, retail, go be a contractor and work/travel until you find what you like.
Not sure why you're being downvoted. Maybe a little preachy, but the gist of the point isn't incorrect
In a large portion of tech people like to pretend that they are absolved of responsibility for their societal contributions. “Get that bag” and all that. Work at Anduril as long as it makes that bread, etc.
It makes sense that someone promoting them to re-evaluate the harm they’re causing by participating would elicit negative response
People don’t particularly care for platitudes from anonymous people on the internet. Even less so when they reduce a complex dilemma in your life to a binary choice between an “easy and amoral” option and a “difficult but righteous” one.
Most people make compromises inside imperfect systems. The person casting judgment almost certainly has their own moral compromises too, except those they understand, contextualize, rationalize, and forgive themselves for.
It’s just tiresome. There may not be a ton of context, but even knowing that someone is bound to a particular place because of caregiving responsibilities should be enough to invite a little more empathy and grace, and a lot less judgment.
I agree. That said, a cursory glance at their post history shows they donate 6-figures to charity, which while very commendable, flies in the face of the idea of being 'stuck'.
In any case, it's quite simple. If you work at Meta, you certainly have other options. Similar-tier companies pay just as well, and lower-tier companies will interview you readily.
We're not talking about someone scraping by here - working at Meta is a choice, and takes hard work to get into. That does not absolve you from the damage the company has done to the world. If you work there, you contribute to it (no matter how small the capacity) and you benefit from it literally through wages and share ownership. Your vested interest is in the company growing. Historically, that has meant via very dark patterns.
I think there would be more empathy if Meta were the only company in the world where it was possible to work. That's "stuck." This is not.
I've quit jobs over ethical boundaries. It's not an easy decision, and "integrity" doesn't quite pay rent, but helped me to sleep better at night and let me live with myself.
They are not understanding that it's not one person's moral failing at the root of it, it's the system that forces everyone into participating in amoral things, including for example the investors of Meta who are getting a bigger bag. That includes every one of you S&P500 index fund hodlers.
i have like 5 companies in my rolodex who would hire me to be fully remote tomorrow
get with the times
Knock it off. Nobody wants to read your braggadocio, and it’s insulting to people who are having real challenges finding work.
There's some kind of irony using outdated terminology like "rolodex" and telling someone else to get with the times. :)
Binning applications for working at Meta seems hilarious and over the top. The ‘thoughtful’ labs are vacuuming up everyone’s chat logs and prompts to train the next model as well.
If they're willing to do this to their own employees that they pay and supposedly wanted to keep around, what are they willing to do with your data? What are they willing to do with the systems they connect to your systems? "Dumb f*cks" has truly been the ethos of this company from day 1.
For context, Zuckerberg once said about early Facebook users, “They trust me. Dumb fucks.”
https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/2010/05/14/facebook-foun...
If you read the linked article it says the leaked data screenshot of some employees private conversation in plain text and other performance information.
It was a bold move to do full screen recording and hoping they would anonymize it.
Garbage company going into a death spiral.
That system is going to be a nightmare in discovery
That sounds like a brilliant idea.
I wonder whether they already thought of that, and are exempting from monitoring the roles most likely to generate "smoking gun" evidence.
They probably wrote the utility with AI - it's not that big a surprise that AI can't secure stuff.
Meta must really be paying a lot!
Indeed → https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries
• Engineer (E3, entry level) $248.2K avg ∴ https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries/software-...
• Engineer (E5, senior level) $629.8K avg ∴ https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries/software-...
• Engineer (E7, principal) $1.69M avg ∴ https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries/software-...
• Engineer (E9, distinguished) $6.09M avg ∴ https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries/software-...
And so on with other roles, as you can see on that page.
I'm making popcorn, anybody want some?
Zuck is so washed as a CEO.
They paused it, but they fully intend to restart it.
Edit: I don’t know why I’m getting downvoted. Quite literally from the article:
> “We will only re-enable MCI when we are confident in the effectiveness of our data protection controls,” Kasriel said.
I'll be the contrarian here.
I think the program was legal and morally fine.
Take into account that these are corporate computers, and the tracking is of work that the company is paying for, so the telemetry, which is highly valuable for analysis and automation, is rightfully theirs.
I also don't think that the purpose of the move was to manage workers and see if they slack off, it was to gather training data, but even if it were, I think that's normal? In any other job managers can, and are expected to, monitor employee productivity, they are paying for it, they need to ensure they are getting something worth. But again, I don't think that was the main goal here.
The computers are not intended for personal usage, if the employee wants to watch netflix, or porn, they are free to do so in their personal computers.
Imagine if this were a construction company, and there's a foreman watching the employees output, and the machine operators have their actions logged so that the machines can be automated in the future. Doesn't it sound reasonable? Is this very different at all?
So yeah, maybe a lot of people see Meta and computer tracking and immediately jump to 1984, but I kind of like nuance more than knee jerk reactions, or jumping into a narrative that we enjoy being angry about.
> Doesn't it sound reasonable?
If you were hired with this as an explicit expectation, yes. It's one thing to know that your actions can be audited in case there's some sort of incident but imposing unlimited surveillance and using that information for the purpose of eliminating your job could be argued to be intimidation (ie. "we can't afford mass layoffs but aggressively monitoring employees will force the undesirables to quit").
No one likes the terms of their employment being changed against their will no matter how legal it might be. Why not make it opt-in in exchange for some other perks? If the data is valuable then compensate employees for the added burden/liability of total telemetry.
I’m not sure the terms of their employment changed; being subject to monitoring has been in practically every employment agreement written in the past few decades.
What did change is the culture and environment. While that term was always in the agreement, it was largely dormant, activated on an as-needed basis to troubleshoot issues, collect evidence for disciplinary actions or security investigations, etc. Now, it’s on 24x7.
As it turns out, they did watch porn: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/10/meta-says-porn-d...
> I also don't think that the purpose of the move was to manage workers and see if they slack off, it was to gather training data, but even if it were, I think that's normal?
This is the cost of losing consumer trust over two decades of untrustworthy acts.
Nope. Nope nope nope NOPE. No part of this is remotely reasonable. Stop normalising mass surveillance. It is not okay. Not even your own employees, to this degree. Employees are humans too (maybe not the ones at Meta, but I'm speaking in general). Just because somebody is receiving a paycheck for something does not make them fair game for anything and everything to be done to them.
> there's a foreman watching the employees output, and the machine operators have their actions logged so that the machines can be automated in the future. Doesn't it sound reasonable? Is this very different at all?
Yes. Every time these analogies to normalise mass surveillance are brought up, they mistake "another human or two can see you doing something in real time" with "a permanent record of every single action you ever take in your entire life, micromanaged down to the millisecond, accessible to many people over a period of years". That is, in fact, very different at all.
Do you believe that police should have their activities monitored at work? How about child care workers? Nuclear power plant operators? Bank tellers?
And if those are ok, what makes them different?
US police are a special case because the US is unique among developed countries in hiring an extremely high proportion of barbaric criminals and failing to hold them accountable even for cold-blooded murder on camera. Even then, body cameras should be for specifically documenting their interactions with the public, not absolute surveillance of everything they do on their shift. Body cameras are completely unnecessary in other developed nations, and would ideally be unnecessary in the US if greater measures were taken to reform the rotten culture, but are perhaps slightly less evil than the alternative, given the power that police have to ruin civilian's lives.
Child care workers, nuclear power plant operators, and bank tellers should absolutely not have individualised, permanent surveillance. These cases are already handled by general-purpose security measures, vetting, inspections, and workplace cameras that are not uniquely focused on one individual, with the data stored locally and routinely wiped.
To reiterate, there is a difference between "monitoring" and "surveillance". There is no issue with ensuring that your employees are actually working, or having another human with eyeballs within eyesight of them. The issue is creating permanent databases logging every little thing they do constantly.
The irony of a surveillance program being undone by its own data leaking is hard to miss. But the more interesting question is what happens next — do they rebuild it with better security, or does the backlash actually change the approach?
My guess is they rebuild it. The incentive to track performance metrics at scale is too strong, especially when layoffs are partly driven by those metrics. The leak just means they'll invest more in access controls and fewer people will have visibility into the raw data.
The uncomfortable part is that most large companies already do some version of this, just less formally. Tracking commit frequency, Slack activity, meeting attendance — it's all legible to management already. Meta just put a name on it and centralized it, which made it a target.
[flagged]
Let me guess, because you, yourself, are not an employee so you don't mind because it does not apply to you ?
It's been a fact of life for as long as I can remember. If you using the companies resources, they are well within their rights to monitor what you are doing.
Just don't use the company stuff and you are fine.
I agree with you. But do you remember when we could chat with a colleague about how much of a doofus our boss was without worrying that some automated system would possibly notify the boss about it? Nowadays big brother is always watching.
because he is smart.
he uses personal cellphone to browse reddit and hacker news
be smart like the top poster
You think Meta employees are only expected to work 8 hours a day?
Also, this isn't about tracking social media usage, it's about collecting employee keys/actions.
There was a time when if your "boss" tells you to install a keylogger on your work machine, it's a black-teaming exercise. How the times have changed...
"Work" is subjective. That idea only works if everyone's boss was as loving and forgiving as Jesus Christ (philosophically speaking).
Some time I spend the whole day sitting at my computer and can't think of a solution to a problem. And some time, I'm readying myself to bed and have to note down the solution that just appear in my mind. How do you even track that? I did a time with time tracking software as a freelancer and that has been the most miserable part of my working life (and I did data entry for survey).
I'm a developer and I mostly do my thinking offline. What I do on my computer is mostly translating my idea to code and consulting docs. Also testing and communication with the team. And all of this is already fairly visible without tracking.
I get paid for my work, not 8 hours a day. I’m a salaried employee. I sometimes have to work more than 8 to deliver things, I sometimes work less than 8. The fact that someone needs to monitor me all day long and potentially could use the information to treat me unfairly is disgusting. I’m not the first in line to defend meta employees, but this is just unacceptable.
Ok but that doesn't change what I said. Whether you work 1 hour that day, or 10, the hours you are giving to the business i.e what they are paying for - You need to be working.
If you're concerned about monitoring during your paid hours perhaps you should focus on being more productive during this time?
I don't think what I am saying is controversial but a lot of people seem to disagree with this
I actually get paid by the hour but I think exactly like you do. Often work more than what I bill for. I'm delivering so much now with swarms of agents it really doesn't even make sense to pay me by the hour. I really think my next job will be a one person company run by moi.
I like to use swarms of swarms of agents, but I think my competitor is using swarms of swarms of swarms of agents :(
The first firm to successfully nest it 40 levels will achieve the singularity.
Given the work that Meta does and the scale that they operate at, there are absolutely real concerns about providing internal access to the activity on someone's work computer. To take an extreme example, Meta has employees who investigate reports of CSAM or other criminal activity on their platform. There have to be very strict controls over who has access to that information.
Wow. What a narrow, naive view.
How?
If you're seriously concerned about the monitoring, what are you doing the company wouldn't approve of?
I guess you don’t mind a camera in the company bathroom watching you take a shit either?