They 'trust me'. Dumb f*ks.
Hooking keystrokes, mouse, screenshots on a local machine is what every decent journaling or timesheet app already does, and nobody cares because the file stays on the user's machine. Meta isn't getting dragged because they figured out how to instrument work laptops. They're getting dragged because they're the ones holding the logs, and "just for training" is a promise that hasn't aged well anywhere it's been deployed the last ten years.
Annoying side effect — the genuinely useful version of this, local activity logs you own for your own records, gets lumped in with bossware every time this comes up. Most freelancers and consultants I know would pay for the former. Most of them would quit over the latter.
More proof that they do not care about you at all. This is Meta's way of moving fast and destroying everything at all costs.
Half my workday is me browsing random tabs while an AI agent does the actual work. They're going to train a model on alt-tabbing and scrolling HN/Twitter/Reddit.
Don't get me wrong. It is not to applaud here, it is simply fascinating looking through a factual lens here.
And maybe there will be more questions than answers. And I bet this is going to be funny, when there won't be a clear picture in the end. What are high performer, low performer anyway? There are many pieces missing. I for example do a lot of visuals using a notebook with a pencil. To this day I find Miro etc. distracting and for my creativity to distracting. Hand writing is different to typewriting. I am way faster in the last case and associate through everything until I lose track of the main thing. Not with notes on paper. I utilize this fact, don't go for one thing over the other, but bloat is the result of doing everything virtually.
So how would my keystrokes then look like? I don't know. Highly efficient, maybe, but lots and lots of gaps without hitting the keys.
Low performers? I was overlooking over 500 engineers, did over 400 interviews, build departments from the ground up, watched people do work and helping them via inhouse developed tools to work better while having more fun.
So I think in Gauss often times and low performers, a term, I despise, but it is used for simplicity, aren't really doing nothing, in fact they work a lot, it is just the content or method that is so bad.
My best devs but a lot of consideration into architecture and communication - I trained them. They fell key decisions and helped teams get better.
The industrious low performers complained about them, that they rarely are doing "the work" on their PC. Well, well.
So, would I feel comfortable? No. And don't do to others - as the saying goes.
But if there won't be any consequences just data which cannot be tight to a worker, or and if, it can only be used to benefit them, I would happily take part in such a data gathering, because we all do personal optimization and I am curious about what the data "says" vs. subjective feeling.
On the other hand, tracking might be inevitable - hear me out - if these people are working on NDAs etc. Leakage is monitored anyway, make no mistake. So it sounds like closing a gap.
Tough, very tough.
I tend to say no one gets ousted in corporate companies for their mistakes but by their foes. So data is one thing, the one stabbing you another.
Really though it seems reasonable to me. They want data to train AI, and their employees are obviously a large source.
They could already track your every click. They have root on your work MacBook. Most employers do.
Martin Niemöller's "First They Came" fits perfectly and it shows how hypocritical it is to approach the subject of ai training only when it applies to you. What a Wonderful World!
Horseshit.
1. Employees are being asked to train AI to replace them.
2. Performance assessments will 100% be impacted. No question.
Thinking back on the OTT interview experience that Facebook helped pioneer, imagine making it through that, getting paid a massive sum of money BUT barely getting by on it because of the location, then they drop this crap on you?
Big Brother is always watching.
I...admire the diligence
I know you've long been hypnotized by libertarianism and the cult of the individual.
Maybe it's time you reconsider in light of the overwhelming evidence that the capitalist class is, in fact, not your friend.
The only known way for workers to assert their rights is collective action. Alone, you are weak and replacable. Together, we are strong.
It's time for a proper tech worker's union, to give us some fangs to claw back our dignity with.
Optimizing ourselves to death.
Capitalism is asleep at the wheel with its foot stuck on the gas pedal.
> The tool will run on a list of work-related apps and websites and will also take occasional snapshots of the content on employees’ screens for context, according to one memo, posted by a staff AI research scientist on Tuesday in a dedicated internal channel for the company's model-building Meta SuperIntelligence Labs team.
ALL YOUR DATA IS BELONG TO US
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If they captured display output as well, it could be a very useful dataset for generalized computer use.
Now imagine a society where your individual daily actions are recorded, reviewed and helpfully advised upon.
Millions of people making millions of actions each day and all recorded compared and sifted for positive feedback and improvement overall.
Just how far ahead would such a society pull compared to one that stays at today’s level. Compared to one that used totalitarian methods enabled by such surveillance?
The difference between Soviet and Western Europe was not the tech, it was the trust.
If we can build a society with f trust then this tech will turbo charge us.
If …
I was curious about this claim and I dug up this article from 2024. https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/software/internet-su...
It's an employee survey so it's not resistant to claims that the number is higher than people know. But I think saying "on all the computers you're given" is an exaggeration at best.
I did think it was interesting that "One in three [employees] have had activity from their employer’s online surveillance used in their performance reviews."
Sounds like if you're being surveilled by your employer there is a good chance you know about it.
I've never experienced anything like that, so it's sort of a window into another world from my perspective.
Sure, you can do everything a human can, but it also seems VERY inefficient
As an alternative, maybe you could just do network in/out?
The computer UI is the way it is because that is optimal for humans, if your plan is to replace humans why not just replace the whole stack os and all to something these models already know how to use?
If you then think of crazy companies such as Palantir, something really has to be done about those entities. As a first step I suggest disbanding those companies, for many reasons, including wrong ethics.
Also, why are the investors not suing the legs off of Zuck for the whole meta verse debacle? It is a scam and pure fraud. Also dumb name, sue for that too. Should have just renamed it meeme.
the signal is every time a human has to grab the wheel. that's a label for what the agent still misses.
if they continue to share their work through open releases despite the leadership change, i hope we get to benefit with their work.
not quite optimistic about the result as i wonder if on aggregate we all consistently interact with computers the most efficient way possible. maybe to beat captcha or scraper detection through mimicry perhaps.
This is clearly and obviously the shortest possible path to a total surveillance society.
Does the executive know better at this point but have toasted the culture and no one can fight against it anymore?
Terminated for under-performance? Subpoena the surveillance data. Get their data scientists in for a deposition to explain the algorithm and schema.
All it takes is one disgruntled employee with deep enough pockets and a large enough axe to grind to turn this training data into nuclear waste that poisons the company top to bottom, but I'm confident nothing will change until that happens, at which point the current crop of leaders will already have their moneybags and have fucked off safely into the sunset.
There is also this effect:
- CEO says "the lights are a bit dim in here"
- that turns into "We need to change all of the lightbulbs in here immediately!"
(this is especially true in firms where the CEO cares a lot about being proactive).
Two great posts/stories about this:
1. This post about smart employees "reading their managers minds": https://yosefk.com/blog/people-can-read-their-managers-mind....
2. In Michael Crichton's book Disclosure there is a great line: "Why did you dress casually instead of wearing a suit? Is it b/c you wanted to do that or b/c the CEO did it and you wanted to show you were part of the team??"
What does this link tell you? https://www.thedailybeast.com/facebooks-sheryl-sandberg-told...
The interesting design question isn't "can we collect this" — it's "what do we lose by not collecting it."
I run a small web tool. Early on I considered session recording, heatmaps, keystroke timing. Every one of those would have made the product slightly better to optimize. I didn't add any of them. Not because of regulation, but because I didn't want to be in the business of explaining to users what I was doing with their cursor path.
The part that bothers me most isn't the mouse movements. It's that there's no symmetry employees can't see what Meta does with their cursor data the same way Meta can see what the employee's cursor does.
They don't even understand what these people do.
It is delusion and lies all around.
I couldn't imagine life without my unique keystrokes and mouse movements.
“ The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good. It is perhaps the only area where the metrics do tell the true story as far as we are concerned.”
i've heard it described that evil is that which believes itself to be good without exception. i think i'm starting to agree...
As far as I understand, there is plenty of research there in disciplines raging from social studies through psychology to game theory and economics, as well as informal simulations, that strongly suggest that human interactions are positive to participants pretty much if and only if those interactions are repeated, which realistically only occurs if participants are circumstantially close already - same neighborhood, same job, family, friends, same school, etc.
One-off interactions are almost invariably toxic with at least one of the participants getting cheated, bullied, or otherwise harmed.
So the whole premise of connecting people unconditionally, including anonymously, automatically, and from opposite sides of the world is inherently broken and doomed to do a lot of damage.
So even Meta's self proclaimed mission is damaging to society if followed, what could possibly at that point be expected from what they actually do, given the combination of basic facts that the primary purpose of any business is to make money, Meta's specific notoriously evident disregard towards ethics, their position as an advertisement business and entertainment provider, being deep into enshitification and market saturation, and of course actual honest mistakes to boot.
> One-off interactions are almost invariably toxic
I think these claims are too strong. I can believe that there's less incentive to treat people well when you don't expect to repeat interactions.
To give a mundane counter-example: last week I had a flight where I chatted on-and-off with the person next to me. I had zero expectations of repeat interactions with them following the flight, and it was still a friendly and courteous exchange, on both sides.
A cynic would say this has nothing to do with AI since meta owns employee machines anyways and has always been collecting data. Perhaps voluntary attrition > layoffs thinking in action.
But I’m having a lot of trouble envisioning how my keystrokes could actually train something you could use while you’re typing. Latency between keystrokes and seeing things appear would kill my productivity way more than a tool could recapture. Heck, when VS Code fell in love with agent suggestions it took me a week to fix my editor so I could be productive again.
I will say that I feel for the folks who work at Meta...I can't help but to feel they have long jumped the shark.
1) With vibe coding being so effective, Meta employees have easy ways to poison the data set in <30 min of work.
2) What could they possibly want or create that would justify the bad press and employee disengagement from work devices? Better spam bot detection? They have to have some of the best already.
3) No really, Meta employees have the opportunity to really mess with the data in quite humorous ways without any pushback (see 0)
They don’t add anything beneficial to society. They exist to sell ads.
Being a terminal application, all interaction is trainable signal (unlike, say, cursor, which is an IDE and let users freely explore, edit the files, move the mouse. Model sees nothing of it, nothing to train upon).
So meta is doing the obvious, we want to train a computer use model, we need training data. Better to capture from employee than buying low quality data.
Btw do they at least pay them extra for this spying or is it supposed to be for free? I mean if they paid at least 30-50% on top of the salary maybe I wouldn't mind doing it on dedicated meta computer.
kk1Gi// file.js<Esc>M/func<Enter>o let<Esc>``
Technofascism.
Fixed it.
Always thought Meta was a god awful run company and this just brings home the cake
Seems like a strange approach in general. I'd have assumed you'd just have it use accessibility features to get at things, if there is no other interface.
Some call it museumverse.
All of the latter plays a huge role, a lot of us don't want to be horrible to a person physically in front of us, evolutionally it makes sense - if you do, you might get a fist in the face. Or no support and help in the future, as whoever is nearby will have a high chance of meeting you again (historically, before modern technology and transportation), or even belong to your tribe.
Notice, however, that all of these factors in the end correlate with pre-existing geographical proximity to the person in question. In fact, the said proximity also maximizes the likelihood that you'll see eye to eye - will not have radical, difficult to overcome differences in world view. Yes, sure, we all "should" understand people existing in very different circumstances, but let's face it, it goes a lot better when circumstances are similar, and that once again correlates with geographical proximity.
So realistically there is a huge correlation between "connecting person A and B over the internet is good" and "person A and B already live nearby and already have a high chance of running into each other physically in the real world".
In its simplest, most primitive form what you want is to give people who have already physically met once a way of continuing the connection even if circumstances drive them apart immediately after. And if possible, keep that connection to more physical-like forms - at least audio, better yet video calls, only if absolutely necessary - text.
Wait, that's called a phone. Invented a gazillion years ago. You meet first, then you exchange the numbers. And then you call and actually talk to the person.
What social networks are doing is a fundamentally problematic way of connecting people even without any recommendation systems, rage baits, and other social and addictive engineering involved, or ads - even in the purest form it's already a problem.
Yes they could have accessed logs before but there’s a difference between directed checking after incidents and active surveillance at scale.
Companies have shown us that IP going to AI providers is acceptable. Once you cross that line your thought workers are assets not people.
TL;DR: The history of fascism and Nazism in the 1930s Europe.
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.
So they can monitor your email and slack server-side, but not your client-side stuff that doesn't touch their servers. However if you use a VPN then they can also monitor your DNS requests and every website you visit. Any kind of client-side telemetry is limited to a few things, however those things can involve what applications you have installed (like spotify) for security reasons or USB sticks plugged in.
We know this is not for security - this data will be collected and weaponized against employees during layoffs. Meta is already doing this for those who are not enthusiastically switching from coding to prompting.
I expect to be monitored, I do not expect to be watched.
If I need to kick back for 20 minutes to think on a problem, I don't want the company to be chewing me out because my mouse movements were not frantic.
In a healthy capitalism, you take care of customers, then employees, then shareholders. In that exact order. Right now the incentives are ass-backwards.
Most cultures around the world are acutely aware that the actions and opinions of their leaders are not a reflection of behaviors and opinions of regular citizen.
It had no impact of recruiters trying to win me back since then.
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.
Feel like I'm reading a Gibson novel here.
A bogus argument, methinks. Consider that the company also owns the phones, but can or do they listen to every phone call ?
> 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.
There remains a thing called human dignity.
If a company can't trust the people it hires, that's a fault in the hiring process, not the employees.
I know you’re in India, but in the US, could this not be considered intellectual property theft on “right of publicity”? Your persona and working style is one of your core values you bring to market; building a simulacrum of that is not something I expect to be part of the “your output is the company’s IP” in an existing contract.
I will give a company the right to try to reproduce my output. But my very likeness and modus operandi? No.
> Under settled Board law, numerous practices employers may engage in using new surveillance and management technologies are already unlawful. In cases involving employer observation of open protected concerted activity and public union activity like picketing or handbilling, the Board has recognized that “pictorial recordkeeping tends to create fear among employees of future reprisals.”10 The Board accordingly balances an employer’s justification for surveillance “against the tendency of that conduct to interfere with employees’ right to engage in concerted activity.”11 In that context, “the Board has long held that absent proper justification, the photographing of employees engaged in protected concerted activities violates the Act because it has a tendency to intimidate.”12
https://www.nlrb.gov/news-outreach/news-story/nlrb-general-c...
Like that "Scott is an asswipe who never agrees to any idea that isn't his" or what?
This is exactly what they're doing, and they aren't the only ones.
>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.
Okay, now this sounds like satire. But I suppose that's the way the world is going.
If keystrokes are captured, isn't this a double-edged sword where maybe the company might be inadvertently collecting evidence against itself if there's an investigation and the investigators want to collect keystrokes?
When I got hired (pandemic lockdowns) all they asked is, "Do you have your own computer? Can you install stuff on it?" and my answer was yes, I had a Linux desktop machine. Of course all their software was specified for Windows and I had to be the one making it all work, but it all really did, and we were fine.
It was an education company and we were teaching cybersecurity, and so the students were not only BYOD, but we were limping by with gratis software downloads and free trials of stuff like Azure and Spelunk. The installation sessions could get really bogged down as we tried to troubleshoot each student's unique setup, and it wasn't really our job, but the software was mission-critical to the class!
I maintained strict separation of accounts with no personal usage in my work-accounts and no work usage in my personal-accounts. My mobile phone was sacrosanct, but see below!
So eventually my role got to a point where all I really needed was Zoom and a web browser that could do Google Workspaces. But then I also became irritated by the creeping nature of MFA. I got really mad when our payroll site unilaterally decided that my personal mobile number was fair game for this. I said I am not mingling my phone into this deal. Eventually I was forced to delete the number, which forced use of my work email instead.
Between this job and volunteering, I became acutely aware of the real issues surrounding WFH and BYOD. I was especially sensitive that any litigation, any subpoenas or discovery involving my employer, could result in confiscation of my actual hardware from home! What if I was doing their bidding on a personal device and some court order needs it or the cops just rush in and pluck it all out? I wouldn't have any recourse.
Now, that is admittedly a far-fetched, even nuclear option. Realistically if I'm working with a reputable employer, it won't happen. But it could, and it'd be disastrous. And that's why I'm very wary of BYOD policies like that, and any mingling of personal resources with work. You're playing with fire.
One must be a fool to do any of this on any company-owned hardware. Facebook or no Facebook.
"this computer is property of WORK CORP, you have no expectation of private on this computer"
If you want privacy use a personal device....
EDIT: While we are here, let's do this for politicians as well :), publicly available, auditable 24-hour surveillance.
And you expect Meta employees, of all people, to believe this?
I realize you can argue whatever is done at work should have no expectation of privacy, and I get that, but as an employer myself I've always felt that schemes like keyboard and mouse tracking are going a chasm too far. Your employees are human beings not robots. In the older context of corporate productivity tracking there are far better metrics available - starting with, I don't know, maybe talking to your employee and asking them how things are going.
I wouldn't have a problem if it were opt-in, but if this were foisted upon me I would surely quit.
Then they’ll deploy models trained on this, and begin capturing employees using AIs that are good at using AIs to do work.
Repeat a few times and they’ll start capturing the keystrokes from people mashing their heads into keyboards with dispair and exclaiming, “Why can’t these models do anything anymore!!”
It’s only once the business is having a cash crunch or will no longer need to hire competitive candidates that they start letting people go without severance.
This will also give them data on which employees aren't using AI enough, and then they'll be PIP'd or let go.
These models already have the skills that humans were using them for, so either by training the models to use subagents or simply inlining the work done by the AI, you have a much easier time training the model to perform tasks from a human-distribution. The humans have done the work of making the human-distribution look more like an AI distribution.
We’ve been moving towards a more and more tyrannical company controlled society for a long time and now they’re straight up doing hacking tactics to train machines to take our jobs. Doesn’t get much more bleak than that.
- the project was time constrained, so hardly any time, and
- there were serious ethical questions which could never be addressed well within the allotted time for this project
So we ended up discarding the idea of collecting data from a representative group, even before we got to the point of asking "how do you do handle that ethically". We ended up collecting data from 1 subject. The student in question, indeed. He handled the data from which he derived heuristics that simulated the data. The collected data therefore never left the student's hands.
<sarcasm>Silly us, we should have just not bothered and collected it from anyone and anywhere. Apparently.</sarcasm>
In all seriousness, this callous and complete disregard for ethical questions offends me so very much.
I hope this is widely hacked. If these employees are any good, someone will whip up a countermeasure that feeds absurdly wild and nonsensical data into Meta's fetid, gaping maw.
What, pray tell, might those be?
The goal is to manufacture a lack of empathy along the lines of: "why should I treat this person better than I was treated".
But then, we're talking about humans, especially the violence-enjoying strata of humans here.
Last time I checked, Facebook is not a thing other than for watching AI generated content, Instagram is still a thing to watch mind-numbing content and get distracted from other problems by doomscrolling.
It’s same as language translators and RLHF annotators doing work to contribute to AI training data. Is Facebook or Instagram solving a problem for humanity that’s worth selling your soul? Won’t a job that can be automated with AI training data of clicks and typing, markdown files, next function prediction with no coherence be significantly worse than a job that requires creativity?
That said -- social media websites were later removed from the "work-related" list. So there was at least some recognition it was overreach and did not match the stated justification.
You can browser personal accounts from your phone.
I’m surprised this needs to be said out loud.
unless you're in a jurisdiction that has anti-surveillance workplace laws, which if you don't should probably think about before Mark Zuckerberg gets the idea to monitor to your body temperature from below the waistline
The presentation of the video and all the comments were on awesome cool ego-centric video understanding research that’s going to totally obsolesce human labor. I couldn’t get over how grim the video was. Here are some people in one of the least desirable positions in the world, and that’s not enough. Now they must labor without a shred of dignity, knowing they’re training their own replacements and likely not a thing they can do about it.
I’ve struggled to find enough freelance work to stay busy recently, but more than that I’m starting to feel a moral crisis. It’s getting harder and harder for me to feel like what we’re collectively doing isn’t absolutely fucked.
This is like going to work in a drug-lab where everyone is required to strip naked to ensure no "product" can be smuggled out. It's a zero trust environment at first blush, with the added terror of it being used to replace you with AI.
People working naked in a drug lab have more job security than meta employees and an equivalent level of respect and trust from their employer. However, they can't unionize because they have no legal protections. Their employer could literally point a gun at them if they complained. That isn't the case for Meta employees. Just sayin'.
I believe this has been the reality of diamond mining.
Meanwhile, nobody seems focused on capturing CEO’s data for AI training.
Imagine in 300 years we are still ruled by zuck, ellison, bezos, musk, thiel, et al, just in ai model form empowered by estates worth more than entire nations and legal protections designed to outlast heat death of the universe. Assuming there is still a "we" living on earth. Charitable assumption I guess.
Someone had to do it, distasteful though it may be. Could be quite hilarious what it learns in the process.
Dogtraining? Dogwalking? Dogfeeding?
Maybe because they're aware that complaining about the boss is protected by law (in the United States and many other countries).
When I joined the workforce a long time ago, I went in with the mindset that: Their property, their equipment, their right to monitor (or even keylog).
I was pleasantly surprised to find that not to be the case, but I've always believed in their right to do so.
Why do people expect to have a right to do non-work related stuff on the job? Every company I've worked for states in the employment contract/policies what you can and cannot do on the job. They never enforce it to the extent that they outline in the policies, but it's usually clear cut.
If you want to rant about the company, do it outside the company! Or at a physical water cooler. When coworkers want to rant to me about the company, they don't use Slack/Teams. They message my personal, non-work number.
Like use the restroom? Personally, I'm not a slave. I am getting more and more used to the idea of having to push back on those who do exhibit such a mentality. Y'all are beginning to become a threat to the rest of us.
In the late 2010s/pre-covid it was very common for employees to port their personal cell phone number to their work phone and just not have a personal cell phone. The internal culture at the company was remarkably open for their size.
That all went away by the time I left in 2022, and from what I've heard it has only accelerated into an employee-hostile environment. I'm not shocked at this move.
If humans are the point, this also goes for keeping work environments humane.
Governments, corporations and any other organizations should all exist FOR the people, not the other way around.
American-style capitalism truly is a disease.
Either way when it comes to ranting about the company: many workplaces don't have a watercooler where all your team mates congregate (e.g. remote/different offices). Also what, you'll rant about confidential work projects over non-work texts?
Why do you renounce to your rights to privacy so easily? You are an employee not a slave, sometimes I have the feeling that Americans do not know the difference.
> If you want to rant about the company, do it outside the company!
You have a right to organize inside the company, and for that the most efficient easy way are the internal company communications. Communications with the purpose of unionizing should be private and the company accessing them should be punished, and if needed C level should go to prison for their crimes.
How do you organize otherwise? How do you contact your colleagues about grievances about the company?
It is mind blowing to see this capitulation on personal rights. It seems that corporate rights are more important than anything else in the USA. It is a pure dystopia.
On the other hand I would be looking for another job if they had keyloggers or were taking screenshots even if they said anything about me shopping on Amazon or randomly browsing Hacker News or any website that wasn’t gaming or Netflix during work hours.
Heck I use to travel a lot more for business and I used my work laptop for Netflix and other streaming services in the hotel.
As long as I’m meeting performance standards it shouldn’t matter.
More substantively: I would like the employer/employee transaction to be one of buing/selling labor. To me, training AI on keystrokes nudges the deal towards selling one's "soul" next to other dystopian tropes like brain implants and work toilets that analyze excretions.
You are correct that employers own the laptops and can install anything they want, which is why I never do anything other than work there - the farthest I will go is participate in employer-hosted shitpost groups/channels, which are not anonymous, and they are free to train their models on that.
If they just want to monitor your computer for the purposes of productivity tracking, that is in their right, imo - just a shitty thing to do.
I guess you never talk to coworkers about your weekend. That's on the job. I see you mention the water cooler; how dare you talk there?
Not that I support it -- but typically companies don't do this in spite of security concerns, they do it to address security concerns. But of course, what meta is doing sounds like a different situation. It sounds like they want to make a model that replaces part of their workforce.
And when all of the above happens Meta will be absolved of any responsibility.
I don't understand how it's legal either. I guess we need laws against it yesterday.
Never trust that you are anonymous.
The cat is out of the bag, but that doesn't mean it's a non-issue.
Politicians will be the first to carve out exceptions for themselves for reasons of "security" while everyone else is surveilled.
Yes, it should literally be the opposite -- with power should come accountability. But that's not how these things work in practice.
Well good thing we can just not vote for anyone and/or remove anyone who tries to take this stance. It's not like they are appointed by God.
The legal environment is the only way to baseline behavior. In countries with strong worker's rights, you generally don't have to fight much to make use of them; it's the norm for management, too. Likewise, the US-style norm of having no expectations toward your employer and the "stay in your lane" type takes rampant in the thread are also symptoms of the environment and its norms.
This sounds unironically a good idea.
The ones who are doing the bad thing are the ones that are having that bad thing happen to them! That's good! That's how you get an actual change!
https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...
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.
If it is as you say, then eventually the house of cards will crumble. Then we can finally go back to work and quit being inundated with needing to use AI for everything.
Edit “Mr. Boy”
Sorry but these lot are truly an evil bunch, just blaming the executives is foolish. The executives are absolutely helpless, they can't do any of this on their own but they convinced some of the worse humans on the planet to do it for them.
A small subset of individuals working there.
You don't need 80k people to make policy decisions, Meta is that big not because of policy makers, but because of infrastructure people and people working on all sorts of Meta's attempts to enter other markets to expand their business, markets that have nothing to do with addictive and/or exploitative social networking products.
A president of a country also can't do anything by themselves, they need a small army of supporters in positions of influence. And still the said army is a percent of the total population.
Besides, let's be real here, yes, Meta's is one of the worst in terms of overall impact, e.g. certainly worse than Google out of the big ones, but the difference is not as big as one might imagine.
Meta also powers WhatsApp, which is basically an operating system of the entire region of Southeast Asia and India, and also a large portion of South America, which together host >2.5B people. Loosing that particular part of Meta (if Meta was to fail) would be a big loss to humanity, loss that Western dwellers refuse to know or accept, but ask anyone living in those areas they'll tell you how much of the economic boom of late in those places rides on connectivity provided by WhatsApp.
Google on the other hand owns YouTube, and in my personal anecdotal experience I get a heck of a lot more misery from YouTube and especially Shorts that I can't seem to escape or avoid, than I do from TikTok or Instagram neither of which I use at all and have no issue ensuring 0 interactions with.
Yes, in the end both do both good and bad, and yet in grand total Meta is worse than Google, but A) the difference isn't as large, and B) it's actually a lot harder to tell than it seems if the net result is even negative in the end. It probably is, but it's hard to tell definitively. As in, stating that some parts of Meta's business are better die and the humanity will be better off is undeniably correct, stating that all of it just needs to seize to exist sounds more like a hyperbolical illustration of sentiment, not an objectively sound proposition necessarily.
https://www.fbi.gov/video-repository/think-before-you-post-p...
https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/fbi-can-neither-confir...
https://www.democracynow.org/2025/10/2/headlines/trump_direc...
https://www.levernews.com/are-you-on-the-fbis-new-watch-list...
https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2025-12-11/justice-de...
I can see an argument for companies not trusting there employee's because most employees harbor borderline corrupt thinking in their work place and have terrible work ethics, of course all of this is brought on by corporate culture so its there fault in the first place, but im not exactly sure what started where.
(I work at Meta)
The only report chain based permissions were around distribution lists which were just some powershell scripts that walked AD every night. These also got used for security groups to gate access to some things. Be default, calendars were visible to all authenticated users unless you made them private or individual events private. The meeting tool leveraged this for example.
I was working on corp email (among other things) there from 2009 to 2016, so I can't speak for now.
You don’t even need any to do something fancy in software. Could just be correlating mobile device presence with work laptop activity. Can triangulate physical location with a handful of Bluetooth or WiFi beacons.
You don't need to "give" them anything -- they already have everything they need due to basically anything you do, especially at work, especially while using company equipment, being legally considered "works made for hire" https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html + https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ30.pdf
Here's how a refusal to them doing whatever they think would maximize shareholder value with any of your output or data they collect from your company computer would actually go down: the company would do something you didn't like, you'd try to complain about it, HR would listen and document everything. In the best-possible case, they'd let you personally opt out. More likely, since you're likely very easy to replace in their minds, they'd refer you to their data privacy clauses in their acceptable usage policy section of the employee handbook, maybe reference the notice sent out to everyone about how they're doing this, then fire you for performance reasons a few months later. You'd be given an NDA and a very average severance, then you could choose to try to hire a lawyer (who would take at least a third of any pre-tax settlement amount) and fight them, in which case they'd settle for more or less the same as the severance package (and keep in mind both that and any court settlement are both taxable income, so you're not getting a windfall in any case), or you'd just sign the NDA and take the severance with no admission of wrongdoing on their part and no legal recourse.
Large companies employ entire orgs of lawyers who specialize in these matters, and it is literally their job to protect the company, not the employees, from lawsuits like this. Is it fully legal and in the clear? Probably not. Will they still 100% get away with it and leave employees with no realistic options or upside attempting to fight it? Of course. Welcome to America, land of the free for corporations which are legally people, just ones with infinite lives who cannot be arrested / imprisoned but can make legal decisions but cannot be subpoenaed. See eg https://www.theverge.com/policy/886348/meta-glasses-ice-doxx... for how the C-suite thinks about this type of thing.
Follow eg https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-and-75-organization... to see what actually happens.
More on how "work for hire" applies in a legal sense:
https://www.brookskushman.com/insights/innovations-at-work-w...
https://outsidegc.com/blog/common-misconceptions-about-the-w...
I am aware of "how the C-Suite thinks about this type of thing", but this is also a good example to surface here of what to redline in future employment contracts. Yes, that will likely shut you out of a lot of places, but the opposite is beyond learned helplessness: it is capitulation to a future that will not end well for the tech worker.
- getting paid half the salary (EU)
I know which one most people pick.
Meta does require you to have a Facebook account. The expectation is that it is your personal fb that you use regularly. However, it doesn’t need to be. You can create a new fb account with a new gmail account and that’s fine. That’s what I did and some others do as well.
That said, 90%+ of employees end up using their real personal account because the language they use makes it seem like you couldn’t do what I described.
Tell that to Elon Musk and Twitter employees.
If that's something he cant handle he might have a problem with personal accountability.
From my perspective a lot of it was downstream of over-hiring in the post-pandemic frenzy. It's hard to maintain that culture while doing large layoffs, and there's no incentive for them to do so beyond the longer term reality that many of their best employees have left and they're increasingly seen as a place to earn a top paycheck in between layoffs.
In many EU countries even if privacy protection is strong on paper, the settlement will be so low compared to US that you won't afford to take any vacation.
> The profession exists in support of human life.
*this is just an observation, not a normative claim
That's a bit self-aggrandizing - especially for Software engineers.
I don't mean to say that this software was the only means of doing either of these things, of course. But we do make tools that people use regularly when living their lives. Sometimes it's just about being reliable or not getting in the way. The modern equivalent of flintstones and sharing stories around the fire.
It's about taking your work seriously - the qualities of what we make matter - and feeling some sense of purpose. And knowing who you're doing it for. I don't think that's being self-important.
Meta already has literally have billions of people's personal profiles and browsing history.
I don't think screenshots of their SWE's IDEs is going to be useful for identifying internet users.
I do agree screenshots themselves are less useful for that.
1. Why use their employee's data to fingerprint input? They could do that to a billion+ of their users instead.
2. Input fingerprinting is multi-decades old science, there are already production products that do this.
It's not like people have an unlimited number of places to work, even if they have Meta on their resume. Many of my colleagues (and myself included) had struggled in the job market in the past before landing at Meta. If it's work for Meta, or suffer more tumult in the hiring market; it's easy to understand why many might decide to take the offer even with the moral implications. I used to bring up politics in the office with coworkers and many people are simply unaware of the consequences of the company's products. There are a few different categories that these people fall into, but the main ones I saw in the office:
1) Chinese H1B holders who are happy to be working in the US at all, and generally apolitical (or view anything as better than the status quo of where they come from)
2) Just normal people who are interested in their own lives and have never been trained to think about the world in a big picture way (some overlap between 1&2 exist of course)
It's very western of us to always be tracking the conseqentiality of our actions even when we're just the cog in a wheel at BigCo. I think that it's the right thing to do, but this sort of reasoning largely absent in eastern cultures, or even for some in the west—even among those who are well educated. It's kind of hard to blame individuals when they either are rightfully consumed by worrying about their own welfare or are for whatever reason not as seminally hyperaware or woke as we can be in the west. Growing up I liked imposing my political philosophies onto everyone; maturity is understanding that even objectively righteous values are only useful for the right types of minds.
On the contrary, once someone has truly been made aware of the ramifications of their actions; it's more difficult for me to extend my sympathy to them. I consider mark and priscilla to be fully implicated based on their exposure to the harm that they're actively, willingly, knowingly causing. Other employees may never get that memo, though, people obviously avoid political talk in the workplace.
And even if "just quit" is not an option - why not push for policy to regulate these corps? Why is it that after all this time, these same corps now also own at least 1 branch of the US government?
And when the EU/Australia/China.. tries to regulate punish those corps, suddenly everyone comes out on HN to explain protectionism, overreach, some -ism, and "actually we need to give them the benefit of the doubt" etc... why not support that momentum?
I really, really want to believe it's bot warfare. But there is this running theme of HN posters who think because something is _legal_, or because you can point at it historically and go "acktually it's always been like this", it's therefore _moral_ and we should not ever push back on the excesses of these awful fucking companies.
Because money is the current representation and approximation of power. It used to be "the yams," but now it's money.
An awful lot of Eastern philosophy would disagree with you.
If you care that your employer is being unethical (such as storing your keystrokes), that's being hyperaware, woke?
I know the definition of woke can stretch like taffy, but it now seems dislodged from its origins concerning race and gender and is now just a vague disparagement of any speaking up to injustice.
Palantir builds these systems for the US government which is (hopefully) something you can hold accountable / can reasonably trust.
Meta builds these systems for itself to make digital cocaine and sell personal data to profit off everyone (including and moreso primarily the elderly and children). You can't hold them accountable, actually pretty much nobody can hold Zuckerberg accountable.
When Palantir helps USG spy on the planet the primary purpose is defeat enemies + protect assets. When Meta builds these systems the primary purpose is digital cocaine.
I think it takes about the same amount of suspended disbelief to say that, as it takes a Facebook employee to believe the primary purpose of targeted ads is to connect customers and businesses.
Either way, I'd definitely hold those directly responsible for collecting and selling of the data way worse than those that just make use of a product. It's like the war on drugs where those making say they will make as long as there are people wanting to buy
Neither. Palantir makes data management software, they've never been in the business of collecting or analysing data themselves at all. There's generally a fundamental misunderstanding online of what Palantir actually does.
Any time you see an article or comment saying something along the lines of "Palantir is stealing your data", consider if it makes sense when you replace Palantir with MySQL, if it doesn't then it's generally safe to assume that article is garbage.
There are plenty of legitimate reasons to have grievances with Palantir, but they're completely drowned out by nonsense.
You’d be surprised how few people actually buy into the corporate culture at these companies. It’s just to get paid because everyone needs a job to pay their expenses.
You want to solve this then lower the cost of housing.
Extremely common with divorce attorneys - and labor law.
Good luck getting a lawyer to sue another lawyer either.
When I bought my home, I had a purchase agreement that said 'I will pay up to 1500$ cash if the property assesses for less than X' (X being the amount I told the realtor I was willing to pay.)
And the property happened to assess EXACTLY for X.
Collusion in markets is nothing new, and even when we regulate people find ways around it.
It is very telling especially in light of the Palantir manifesto, that all of this technology is being applied against individuals instead of towards ensuring business compliance.
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!
Don't put some mystery where simple greed is perfect enough explanation and there is little worry about others, some could use the word 'selfish' too. US society at large seems to me structured that way - there is no social net for the unlucky, healthcare also varies a lot based on disposable cash/job, good education is only for rich.
There are people who are naturally gifted and intelligent. These people can just pick up and learn different things on their own.
There are also people who do well at certain tasks and their life allowed them to obtain a higher education.
For example, I used to assume doctors were smart. However, the reality is that a small number of doctors are smart/intelligent people. Others are just going by the book, you throw them a curve ball and they fold. This applies to people at Meta, Google, NASA, and any organization.
I would argue smart/intelligent people see the negative impact of things BEFORE it affects THEM directly, there were people whistleblowing the real impact of smoking, fossil fuels before the information became public and well known.
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.
Apparently, money wins over principles for 99% of us. How is this different and how are we better than Meta employees?
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.
It's not just for pay, it's for pushing back on inhumane horse crap.
It was metaapes, iirc.
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.
100% of the people at my company use their computer for personal tasks, and this is permissible under our policies. Our company is fully BYOD and owns zero computers, and zero cell phones.
Per TFA, this thing is literally taking screenshots of what is on the employee's screen. At work my screen sometimes had things such as: performance data on other employees, my own PII from HR systems, PII from customers, password managers, etc. It's also logging keystrokes. How many times do you type passwords a day.
Collecting that kind of information on purpose is truly wild. Imagine the security safeguards you would need just to prevent it from leaking. Wait what, they're explicitly collecting it to train LLMs with it? God help us all.
Here (UK) we do have a bit of variety, thanks to devolution and bloody mindedness. I'm talking about English here (possibly Welsh too), rather than British (England + Wales + Scotland) or even UK (England + Wales + Northern Ireland). Wales is actually a bit more complicated than that but let's keep it simple.
Here (England), you advertise a house price and invite buyers. You generally engage one or more estate agents (realtors) I think it is called an "invitation to treat" in legal terms.
... negotiations ...
Once a price is "agreed", contracts are drawn up by both sides and "exchanged". When the exchanged contracts are both accepted, then the contract is binding on both sides. Basically: the Buyer will Buy and the Seller will Sell etc.
I think the US is fairly similar in that you do have to agree to something before it becomes a binding agreement.
I'd be more concerned about industry-wide blacklisting.
But I also had a different situation where we also decided to hire someone, only to find out that we can't because he's been let go from another company owned by our parent company, and his severance agreement said he can't work for the same group of companies for 12 months. I think he was genuinely unaware that we're part of the same group(if was a huge corporation) and it just never came up in any conversation until HR tried to put together paperwork for him.
His eyes glaze over and he just reads that instead in his corner vision instead of listening to you, and you get snubbed forever more
How can they legally mandate an exit interview when you resigned? Is it part of the employment contract? What would have happened if you showed them the finger and not participated?
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-block-lists-affect-your-...
https://medium.com/@ossiana.tepfenhart/the-no-hire-list-is-r...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/16/silicon-v...
This is rather naive. Palantir makes politics by creating and funding a SuperPAC to discredit a former employee who happens to support the RAISE act.
Leading the Future, a super PAC whose funders include the founders of companies like Palantir and OpenAI, is spending millions of dollars this election cycle, and a considerable amount of that money is going toward attack ads against Alex Bores – even though Bores himself used to work for Palantir.
https://youtu.be/znKb71kLG5c?si=5Q9B88bXaGCkgebN
They even have a political manifesto, a thing that a private company dedicated to data analytics, should definitely not have:
https://gizmodo.com/alex-karps-supervillain-manifesto-is-put...
It already is illegal in developed and civilised countries
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.
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.
Is the same reason why they have to say reasonable.
It’s best to have separate devices so they just don’t have the intelligence about you. That can be permanent, left behind, and then increasingly possibly available to AI models forever.
Would it benefit neural link to dog food their employees? What if there was a 5% chance of death. What if the employees signed in the dotted line anyway. Someone might say, sure that's fair play. Others might say as a society we shouldn't allow people to be treated as assets.
Is it reasonable to change someone's job description to having every action they take be subjected to company ownership? Depends on who you ask I guess.
It's going to cause a major break at some point, probably sooner than later.
[citation needed]
https://www.lawinsider.com/clause/right-to-use-employees-nam...
There were issues. One of the biggest was that it was 1994-1995, I lived in Regina and that city was not an early adopter. But the guy who ran the company had us doing all kinds of stuff for him.
Then he ran out of money. Since he couldn’t pay his staff he tried to sell his almost non existent client list to a competitor. I got a little lost on the details because they didn’t really make sense but apparently I was supposed to work for free for six months so he could sell his client list and then pay me.
I was 17 and really badly wanted to buy a Pentium processor before I started university so I was tempted but my parents had to explain that that was the single dumbest thing they had ever heard. I didn’t get a Pentium processor until 1997 because of that dude and I’m still a little bitter.
Moral is, buy the client list so the nerds can get to 90mhz. :)
The ones on the ‘inside’ are doing to 500% of the time I’m sure
Also, capturing keystrokes and mouse movements only when at work and on work computer isn't really constant surveillance. Capturing all our code, text, photo and video (made at work or at home) seems worse and we don't bat an eye.
But the discussion was about Meta employees in general. They're heavily involved in the second type of surveillance that you alude to.
they can, will and are going directly into like 9 sociopath's pockets at your peril.
In the USA this is mostly theoretical since HR could immediately fire the employee due to at-will employment.
But in Canada, it's a much bigger issue due to labour protections.
e.g. Many managers at American multinationals gave assurances over email to employees about work-from-home arrangements. Then the company does a huge RTO push.
When the employee refuses, HR discovers they can't fire the employee without a hefty buyout.
Best not to give assurances if you're managing a multinational team.
Is that an American thing? I've been a manager for years and never heard of that happening. I didn't even know how much the people I managed were paid.
https://mathewsdinsdale.com/employers-advisor-march-2025/#:~...
TBH at this point I don't believe you are a real person.
The fact that you don't believe people who don't share your same opinion on mixing work and personal stuff are somehow not "real" is part of the problem.
I say semi-official because someone asked the question at a Q&A training thing with IT, and that was the IT manager's response.
You can see the EU's guide here: https://www.edps.europa.eu/data-protection/data-protection/r...
> Limited private use of these tools is often permitted, generating a level of expectation by employees for privacy: employers should not routinely read employee' emails or check what they are looking at on the internet.
Maximizing shareholder value by observing you doing job in the pursuit of replacing you with a very small shell script is a great reason that they've just discovered.
Get your own laptop, pay for your own cellphone, use your own internet service, etc. If you create anything of value on their property or with their property or during times they're paying you in any capacity, expect them to use it for profit.
I mean I have my own laptop and phone, why would I use a work device for that stuff?
Because you're traveling for work, and carrying two separate laptops eats into your limited baggage size/weight. Things are marginally better now that everything uses the same standard charger, but not much.
I just do personal stuff on my phone.
That was a few years back, dunno if that was fixed.
It’s actually quite reasonable and logical.
https://french-business-law.com/french-legislation-art/artic...
On an french executive like contract, the boundary between "at home" and "at work" is very, very blurry.
It varies by state in the USA. Some states have strong protections for work you do "on your own time, on your own equipment, that isn't connected to your work." Others, not so much...
Where I grew up you do have legal right and social expectation not to be under surveillance at work. You even have an expectation of privacy in public spaces - I know this is not the case in other countries, but I accept/know that and it would be senseless to imply this is expected everywhere.