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.
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.
The workers have always been assets though. They turn JIRA tickets into money. Any notion a company would treat a person as a human being and not a means to an end is unfounded, full-stop. The company is a machine that makes money. Machines do not have feelings.
Machines don't have feelings. But if a human is subjected to machine treatment there should be safe guards. Otherwise we all may as well live in goo filled tubes like in the matrix. At some point we have to decide what is fair treatment for human beings, similar to how we decide fair treatment for lab rats and lab puppies.
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.
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.
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.
It is even worse in France: if you code open source "on the side" of you work, at home, the company which employs you may claim the copyrights of it. I had to add explicit exclusion of this claim of copyrights in my job contracts to protect my personal work.
That was a few years back, dunno if that was fixed.
That is not correct; assuming you are not using an employer’s equipment on employer’s time, and/or working on what the employer pays you to do for them or are working on something that is competing and a few other reasonable caveats.
As far as I was told, this is not enough, you have to add extra legal care, even more if you are on an 'executive' type job contract, and you have to double that if there is "too much" connection/"look-a-like", between the software at work and the open source software you contribute to "at home".
On an french executive like contract, the boundary between "at home" and "at work" is very, very blurry.
AFAIK it's the same in the USA, that's why one of the first questions when interviewing with a company is to ask them about their moonlighting policy if you do want to work on a side project.
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...
This is common in North America too. In Canada, people really should be going through their personal projects and getting a moonlighting clause added before they sign any employment agreements. Employment has gotten tough so a lot of juniors aren’t doing this with their first jobs and we’ll start to see the ramifications of that in about five or ten years.
Can depend on the field too. I work in drug discovery and if the FDA was to request data that requires my computer they would have access to everything I had on it...Including my texts if I happened to log in to my personal apple account since it's a Mac.
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.
Reasonable personal use does not at all in any universe imply privacy from a personal perspective.
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.
Not having AI companies is reasonable trade off for not having all of my data including full DNA sequence being recorded 24/7 with absolutely zero care of privacy or protection and shared with everyone who has some marginal amount of money to buy it.
Thats... a poorly crafted mumble jumble without any underlying sense, even ignoring insults. Can't handle existence of society where quality of life is higher priority (and you see it on the ground very well) than some sum on account or meaningless titles and rat race achievements or office zero sum games?
It's obviously an unwitting parody account. Calling yourself "Der Einzige" while reciting an incoherent script of internet clichés is indistinguishable from satire -- hilariously unintentional parody.
"Companies have shown us that IP going to AI providers is acceptable" This is where I'm expecting future collision; you can't both value IP for it's training value, and yet devalue it for the actual sources of IP (people owning their own likenesses or orgs collecting data from their own activity)
It's going to cause a major break at some point, probably sooner than later.
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.
This goes back to 1995 when I was just finishing up grade twelve but it left quite the taste in my mouth. The web industry was just starting to kick off in 1995 and people were opening up web design firms. At the time, young people had part time jobs and while my attempts to pump gas had all ended in rejection, I managed to get a job doing ‘web design’ which at the time meant typing things like <tr> and <td> hundreds of times a page.
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. :)
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.
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.
What Meta does (and here I want to be clear that you can replace Meta with Apple, Microsoft, Google, Palantir...) is eventually public knowledge, profusely discussed even on HN. This means substantial amount of people have been aware, for decades.
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?
> 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.
> 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?
Because money is the current representation and approximation of power. It used to be "the yams," but now it's money.
You remind me of my former, younger self and I applaud the appeal you are making to our better selves. All I'm stating is simply that many people don't care, or can't be made to care. But further, there is a pontificating nature about the way you reason about these workers. In the case of my colleagues at Meta, many feel that they are so fortunate to be able to work in the US at all. Even if they did care, it would be rational for them to continue working there against their moral qualms anyways. Because no one would choose to go back to their home country and do the same work for a paltry fraction of the pay.
Not speaking philosophically. I'm just talking about my experience on the ground working with chinese (as a fellow chinese). Some of them are interested in global affairs, certainly, but I find it to be more common from people raised in the west.
Was quite tired when i wrote this; just want to be on the record saying that i don't necessarily think that people in the east haphazardly just do whatever they're told. there's more nuance to it than that; but i just observe generally that in the east there isn't a culture of political motivation or organizing, or democracy at all. So it's not at all surprising when people don't assign any political meaning to their work—even in the cases where one so overtly exists.
> 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.
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.
Feels good to read the "ex-"-part in your sentence. It'd be analog to my supervisor sitting right behind me and keeping a super dense protocol - no fucking way, ever.
No. It would be best if it included the higher-ups too. I think we all just assume that the c-suite, and anyone who might talk to the legal department, are exempted. And HR (medical info). Or maybe meta is just that stupid that they havent.
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.
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!
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.
Why do you think they don't fully know what they are doing, they are smart folks. Now we all know how everybody needs to be the hero of their story, but self-lying only gets you so far in life, sub-consciousness will give you shit.
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.
I've lived long enough to know that "smart" folks can be extremely dumb.
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.
I thought mass quitting in solidarity would happen when programmers realize how their work is used to train AI and replace them. How many quit because of that? Doesn't seem like many.
Apparently, money wins over principles for 99% of us. How is this different and how are we better than Meta employees?
I don't think the two things are comparable. While it would be inconvenient for me personally if I was replaced by AI, it would be an enormous social good as the resources saved could go somewhere else. The same could not be said about everyone under constant surveillance by some megacorp or the government.
Are you so sure that replacing humans is "enormous social good"? For whom is it good, exactly?
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.
I work in a non-profit sector, if they could save money by replacing me they could use the money elsewhere where they desperately need money. So lots of people would benefit. That same principle wouldn't apply if I worked for some mega corp of course.
But the discussion was about Meta employees in general. They're heavily involved in the second type of surveillance that you alude to.
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.
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.
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.
It always happens to the most deserving group of people before it happens to you, and then there's no one to voice any concerns about your own fate, because they all got what you supposed they deserved.
TL;DR: The history of fascism and Nazism in the 1930s Europe.
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.
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.
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.
This actually came up with multiple companies I worked at in Sweden. Apparently the law here is quite strict that you _can_ use your computer for personal matters and that your employer is not allowed to spy on you on those matters.
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.
There is no expectation of privacy on your work machine - that's a given.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Right, it's extraction on steroids. They can no longer extract more from customers, so employees are obviously next.
In a healthy capitalism, you take care of customers, then employees, then shareholders. In that exact order. Right now the incentives are ass-backwards.
Don't confuse employees with execs. It's a gigantic company with almost 80k employees.
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.
Oh come on, these are some of the highest income earning employed workers on the planet and they have constantly shown they are A-okay with working on systems that enable mass misery, have no qualms against profiting off a genocide, are more than happy to give conference talks on how they implement mass surveillance.
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.
Execs was indeed more of a metaphorical description.
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.
In my experience at other companies recruiters and pretty much no one else has any idea that someone has been blacklisted, until you do all of your interviews and tell HR to hire that person and that's when they tell you the person is on some kind of shit list and we can't hire them. That was an awkward conversation with someone who was basically told we'll be making an offer soon.
No it was company specific. Basically that person used to work for our company, years prior, in a different office in a different country.
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.
What? Hiring is a contract between employer (company entity) and employee. No individual "you" can hire anybody except through the company's official process. If HR says "no we won't extend an offer," a lowly HM extending an offer would be clear-cut fraud.
Managers usually have the authority to bind the company to an employment contract. Even if they don't, the rule of "apparent authority" often means the employee can still sue.
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.
>>Managers usually have the authority to bind the company to an employment contract
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.
I believe it happens more often in Canada. Here's a case where the RTO ultimatum was ruled constructive dismissal, because the manager made a verbal agreement to amend the terms of employment.
Until the day when Zuckerberg meets you, and his Ray Ban glasses profile your face and pull up that comment on your exit interview as pertinent information.
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
> I insulted him in my mandatory Exit Interview form from HR when I resigned.
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?
Nothing happens, it’s optional. However if you want to be able to be rehired it doesn’t hurt to do it. It doesn’t take long and you don’t really have to say anything.
I became increasingly irritated at my employer's BYOD policy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's fine but realize you are not representative of the average tech worker or indeed any white collar worker such as those we are talking about in this post.
You're right, maybe they should put cameras in there too. But there's a reason we don't yet every worker still explicitly or implicitly knows not to use their work computer for personal tasks, as people can and do get fired for doing so.
This is a ridiculous statement. Everyone I know at my company uses work laptops for personal stuff. It's not in the land of freedom though, so great leaders like yourself can't fire people at will.
TBH at this point I don't believe you are a real person.
I stopped doing any personal stuff on a work laptop long time ago, like 10+ years ago. There is absolutely nothing on my work laptop which is not work related. Working from home though helps, I always have my laptop next to me. Same with the phone, under no circumstances I will do anything work related on my personal phone (and yes I do have a company provided phone with MDM and etc).
Consider, do they ever go on explicit websites on that computer? No? Because they know that's surveiled while a personal computer for the same purpose is not. As I said, people do know the difference and might do light personal things like googling something unrelated to work but wouldn't do e.g. banking on a work computer. If they do, well, it'll be their fault if they ever get fired for doing so.
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.
The semi-official policy of my employer in Denmark is you can watch porn on a work computer, so long as you're paying for it. (This reduces the risk of malware etc.)
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.
> 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.
Most companies just don't have a reason to look through the computer they're letting you use to do your job. Don't give them a reason.
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.
Exactly, no one is stopping one from using their personal devices for any personal purpose, and the fact that somehow people are defending wanting to do personal things on a work laptop is utterly baffling to me. Like another commenter said, I always grew up with the notion, legal and social, that a company laptop is absolutely not your property and companies can and will look through it. Use your own devices for your own tasks.
But the legal notion from where you grew up might not apply worldwide right? People aren't saying you are wrong, they are just saying things are different in other places.
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.
> 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 make it a point to use the office bathrooms only to excrete food I ate from the work cafeteria. Personal food I ate at home I excrete in my personal bathroom.
It might surprise you, but culturally, not all companies are this way. I know some are, but some are very different.
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.
That sounds like a truly dystopian take to me, but suppose you're right and nobody should ever use their work computer for anything personal.
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.
Your screenshots go to your managers, not just anyone in the company. At Meta there are very strict safeguards for preventing employees e.g. stalking their exes, so I'd assume the same security is used for even PII filled images.
Im pretty surprised you're getting so much flak for this. This is the least controversial opinion I've seen on HN. I've been working for ~30 years, and every job I've had, if you actually looked at the IT policies, they were all very clear that work devices were for work, personal devices were for personal stuff. It wouldn't even occur to me to cross the streams. Carrying a second phone for personal stuff is a trivial burden.
I'm also very surprised, so much so that one of my comments got flagged for it. Seems like it's a few dissenters while others have mentioned concurring with this fact as I also have always been under the impression that work hardware is for work only. And then some people are talking about how it's authoritarian or anti human, like, it's not that deep.
> every job I've had, if you actually looked at the IT policies, they were all very clear that work devices were for work, personal devices were for personal stuff
There's quite a difference between that and zero privacy, and there's also quite a difference between "IT policy says" or "the law permits" and "this is how things ought to be".
That said, between necessary endpoint security and the potential to get caught up in corporate legal disputes I feel like maintaining a strict separation is advisable. But that doesn't mean I support unnecessarily invasive surveillance or think it's a good thing.
You already do and your consent is part of your employment. Check your employee handbook, search for things like "data privacy" and understand how https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ30.pdf applies in the modern world, especially around AI. TL;DR companies can do whatever they want with your work / observe you and you have no real meaningful recourse.
/facepalm If we're going to debate norms and ethics, sending one liners into cyberspace won't get far. There are better ways. Invest in your conversational skills and listening skills, please. Otherwise you are a moth and HN is a streetlamp.
> 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.
I am a European in Europe and I expect the same. Why would I assume otherwise? The company laptop is full of spyware, starting from the OS. I have no reason to consider it "mine", and no desire to do so. If I want to do anything private (including things that my company would not like) I can do so from my private devices.
Europe is a big place, but in my area of Europe it is very illegal to monitor employees this way. If you were to be fired for something that illegal surveillance turned up, I would consider it a good thing - with the settlement money you could take a couple years of vacation.
> with the settlement money you could take a couple years of vacation.
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.
I've never worked a software development job where I didn't have a company-provided machine that I installed Linux on. I installed the OS, I have root on the machine, I wiped it and returned it empty when I was leaving the job.
Lucky you, I guess. In all the companies I worked for I have had a company-provided Windows laptop where the OS was managed by IT. The degree of freedom (e.g. what software could I install, what websites were blocksd) varied.
No to disagree with you here because I wholly support this position. But I can see the problem from both angles. The problem, it seems to me, is that, and Im not sure which came first, employees started being reckless at work, probably because employers stopped caring about the treatment of their workers, which ramped up the viscous cycle to where we are now.
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.
If "most" employees are corrupt and have terrible ethics, why is the company hiring them in the first place? I don't think I've ever worked anywhere I thought that a majority of my coworkers fit this description. This sounds pretty much identical to what the parent commentee said: it's a hiring problem. Either the company is bad at hiring people who don't have these traits or they're actively selecting for it.
> A handful of engineers were let go as the result of a re-alignment, and their AI counterparts are actively maintaining their code.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Strong disagree (especially under US law). Consider what this means for union organizing in the context of this 2022 NLRB memo.
> 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
Wait so the engineers doing novel work are ousted; you fire the engineer that had the skill set to produce the work in the first place? Surely this is creating a Stasi-like neighbour snitching environment with chilling effect where the better you do the faster you become a target for replacement by engineer's incentivized to win points by replacing you. Even being very charitable where the scenario is the code was so poor that the code the employee is working on is so entrenched in domain knowledge they've become a huge bus factor, an LLM is going to make that kind of code worse. I'm struggling to imagine the subset of people this replaces that is not a long term detriment to everyone working there. Those people became "key personnel" for a reason no?
Just speculating, but the intention wasn't reducing key personnel risk. It was so that your employer could fire them and replace them with an agent running off of their associated skills.md.
At the risk of sounding like an LLM, a laptop is not just "something you get at work", it's literally your work tool. If you were hired at Shit Producers Inc as a defecator, you'd damn bet they would surveil the bathroom stalls there.
Well, no, there should be an expectation of privacy; an employer shouldn't just be able to have a palantír for their employees.
>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.
Question: I have heard that at some tech companies that use internal chat software, the general practice is for IT to set it so that the messages are automatically deleted at the end of the day. In Google Chat this is a feature called "turn off history", and the idea behind it is that it can reduce a paper trail when there are investigations into the company doing something that's potentially monopolistic or otherwise shady.
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?
Any fallout or monetary changes you could sue for, a company like Meta can probably pay for and still turn their huge profits. It seems like these companies do little to hide their shady actions at all.
I've always said if corporations were governments they would be totalitarian fascistic dictatorships. This is just them evolving to their final form. No idea why anyone would want to work at a corporation like Meta by choice the same way I don't understand why anyone would move to North Korea, but I guess the money is just that good.
It being protected has nothing to do with a presumption of privacy in corporate communications. At a minimum you should be aware that your work related communications are subject to discovery.
It amazes me that people seem to think that once they have clocked in for work they have entered some kind of dystopian dictatorship where all their rights are immediately forfeited. And that people are fundamentally not allowed to push back against this kind of bullshit.
What right is forfeited? The only reasonable assumption to make is that your boss can read everything. Regardless of if you think it is fair or not it is still the safest assumption.
> You’d no longer be able to disent, or discuss anything non-work related with even the slightest expectation of privacy.
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.
While you have the right practical approach, I do believe companies should face harsh regulations preventing this kind of monitoring. It has almost universally negative effects, from enabling union-busting to exploitation to all kinds of discrimination and favoritism.
Union busting is easy to do and hard to prove. This would act as a supporting regulation by making it more difficult. I imagine a legal framework similar to other privacy regulations: nothing about specific software or implementations, but instead new classes of data that are illegal to collect or store about your employees. There is complexity there, but something like mouse movements and keystrokes as described in the article is completely black and white.
>Why do people expect to have a right to do non-work related stuff on the job?
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.
the fact that the employees have voluntarily consented to wearing the diapers means that wearing the diaper is better than any alternative available to them, which proves that forcing employees to wear diapers maximizes total social utility
It's absolutely their right, but it's a dramatic cultural departure from the history of the company.
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.
I won't pretend to be a mind-reader of the executives involved. I was a line engineer, so effectively watching from the sidelines. It was temporally close to Sheryl Sandberg leaving her role as COO, but I have no insights into how much that was a factor, a reaction, or neither.
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.
I did mean engineers in general (I work with and have great respect for mechanical engineers, for example, and my folks were in construction), but I don't it's necessarily self-aggrandizing, either. I've worked on chat software and know people who met using my software and got married and have kids. I've worked on software somewhere in the chain of publishing important ideas, or just to share a joke.
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.
1. But they are not paying for your training which you are bringing to the company.
2. About ranting about company, it is difficult to organize. That's why unions existed, and that's why unions were allowed to meet in work hours.
There is no clean separation between personal and work. It is also more efficient to blend them (if I expect a baseline level of non-snoopiness on my work computer, I will text my boyfriend from my work laptop... obviously beneficial for the firm).
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?
> 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).
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.
I don’t care if a company monitors which websites I go to on a work computer, what applications I run or what I say on Slack.
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.
Companies pay their employees to build things. They do not pay their employees for their likeliness or the inner workings of their brains. Meta is trying to get the latter by keystroke tracking. It is an overreach in that context.
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.
This comments pairs really well with the song Sixteen Tons - I cued the song[1] and re-read your comment.
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.
You come with a belief, then you wonder why other people don't have the belief. The belief was exogenous for you. Why do you believe the belief is not exogenous for others?
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?
I really don't understand how this is legal. I guess Facebook maybe doesn't actually have any compliance requirements in the USA, but time series screenshots of any SRE's screen are going to contain data that should not be stored by some data vacuum. I know Meta has a reputation for shitty data handling practices and US regulations are light compared to Europe, but how are they planning on securing passwords, encryption keys, PII, etc. ? Can employees turn this off at their discretion? What happens if someone forgets to turn it off before they cat the companywide ssh root private key? Even setting aside legality, someone with access to this training data would have what sounds like an unacceptably broad level of access to company systems unless Facebook wants to get hacked.
This is legal for most businesses under US law, especially on company devices. And unfortunately not unheard of. Compliance with this data is typically handled in the same way you'd handle any data access situation -- by restricting access to the screencaps to a specific group of people.
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.
I understand the security spyware, though I think it's somewhat questionable there. But this sounds like deliberately putting all of your most sensitive data in a blender and then inevitably letting anyone get a taste of the smoothie.
Just like you'd secure data on a normal internal production system, I'd presume one wouldn't simply let anyone get a taste of the smoothie. But who knows -- move fast and break things, I guess.
This data is going to get leaked in a breach. It will be used against you in a court of law. It will be used for training and (regardless of what anyone says) will be used to fire you once the AI can do your job.
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.
It doesn't have to get leaked. They can sell it and use it as another means to identify Internet users. Meta is pretty infamous for identifying, tracking, and understanding user behavior. We are kind of past the point where these companies care at all. If you think the push to add age verification to operating systems is an unrelated giggle I envy you. Something something Cambridge analytica.
They could perfect it in house and then roll it out as a product. The way people type and use a mouse are pretty identifying especially when coupled with other things.
I do agree screenshots themselves are less useful for that.
I would be highly surprised if they don't do this already for bot detection... but again, if they want to do it to track people on the internet, the data that would be useful is data from the internet, which they have an incredible wealth of -- not a dataset that is several orders of magnitude smaller from their internal employees' desktops.
All psychological experiments that loosely relates to Web became default legal when A/B tests became normalized after Google started it. It is not something that may be covered by blanket waivers. It's something that require participation under free will and independent review boards and such. For every single one of those little tests.
The cat is out of the bag, but that doesn't mean it's a non-issue.
Yeah, this is crazy, remember when engineers were actually engineers and that meant something? Imagine asking to install spyware on your lawyers' firms' company laptops because you didn't trust them not to make some deal with the judge. Or demanding 24 hour monitoring on everything a doctor does because you need to review the footage at any time.
EDIT: While we are here, let's do this for politicians as well :), publicly available, auditable 24-hour surveillance.
If we are living in a democracy and in majority are able to live democracy, then yes. If on the other hand most people are not willing or unable to live democracy, then we will get stuck with corruption.
Of the examples you listed, politicians are the only ones you directly fund and supposedly work for you. Your lawyers and doctors aren’t your employees, and they also don’t work on your property (though lawyers might handle your documents). The biggest thing this points to is that the mask is almost entirely off between employee-employer relationships in the US, and it looks like by ensuring everyone depended on employment for insurance before turning this corner, there’s not much resistance left.
This is why a worker's rights movement is important. You shouldn't have to rely on your employer's goodwill. Reasonable privacy rights on work equipment should be guaranteed by law, and any large company should have a Euro-style worker's council.
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.
.... I'm not the person you're asking but I can give curious anecdata on a home purchase....
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.
Hmmm. Property purchase agreements are rather different in your neck of the woods than mine!
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.
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.
> When Palantir helps USG spy on the planet the primary purpose is defeat enemies + protect assets.
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.
Does Palantir collect data or just analyze aggregated purchased data? I'm not familiar with the data collecting SDKs available as I don't whore out myself/my sites like that, so maybe there is a pipe directly from them????
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
> Does Palantir collect data or just analyze aggregated purchased data?
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.
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.
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.
Those are legitimate grievances as mentioned, what they are not is Palantir themselves collecting massive amounts of data, which is often what they're portrayed as doing and what the GP asked about.
Or stuck with HCOL that is the Bay Area. There’s not really any purely “ethical” companies in the Bay Area that pay enough for you to live there.
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.
Medical device companies are run very differently from most technology development companies. They have to be because the stakes are high, evaluation criteria are different, and medical related marketing and sales have separate industry managed channels and venues.
fun fact: they all made above $1-2 million, some even a lot more via meta stock. so after that they stopped doing that kind of thing. ethics can be bought it just have different price everyone.
Yeah, it is complete bullshit. Even if they don't do it straight away, once they have the spyware in place, it's only a matter before they do. It is Meta after all.
It will be interesting to see how the people who maintain (in my opinion) one of the worst offending organizations out there for invading your privacy - and generally treating you in a manner that lacks human decency - respond to having their privacy invaded, and being treated without basic decency.
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.
I like to imagine they’ll mostly capture meta employees using AIs to do work.
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!!”
I am to speculate that they are going to use this as an excuse to let people go without doing mass layoffs and having to pay severance. Training AI is just an excuse.
Many many moons ago I refused to implement a calendar event scraping system at Meta where it would look at all of your meetings on the calendar and do "analysis". IDK what ever happened to that task, I assume it died a death of no one else being willing to do it. This was probably 2011 or so, I can only imagine it has gotten so much worse.
It's pretty easy to scrape your own calendar events in Meta. I'm not sure about others' as I'm not a manager, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were visible as long as someone is in your report chain.
It's been a while so I don't remember the specifics, but the I think the request came from someone working at Accenture from one of the FinTech teams? At the time the proposal had both technical limitations and performance implications on top of the privacy issues. To do it right would have meant standing up a new set of client exchange endpoints and permissions that were far too permissive so the task just got ignored for a long time and I think that manager behind it went away eventually or they settled for public data inside the company.
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.
White collar firms with a reputation for paying well don’t cheap out on severance. It’s a cheap way to get employees to sign some stuff reducing the risk of lawsuits, plus their unemployment insurance premiums stay lower.
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.
While it would be a hilarious failure mode to encounter, this is actually a good thing!
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.
Not when all of the marketing of LLMs is touting their abilities to do the exact thing and that is what investors are being presented.
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.
Every day I grow more and more glad that I turned down a Meta offer. It was probably a hire-to-fire offer anyway, not based on any engineering prowess on my part. Still, I couldn't be more relieved I dodged that bullet.
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.
So, back in 2021, I supervised a student project where we aimed to simulate human interaction with the browser. Obviously, we needed data on human interaction. After discussion, we ruled out collecting data from a group because:
- 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.
The way you fight this is to get another job. At this point all jobs in big tech are just temp jobs anyways. Eventually the reality of this will sink in and the smart people necessary to power this company will invest time into career paths that pay a lot but more reliably.
I'm so happy that EU and UK have laws against this kind of thing and so I will still be able to work somewhere in the future(TBD what future means, though).
presumably they were abused as line cooks or whatever and once they make sous chefs they become abusers. Similar dynamics exist in jail, in fraternities, etc.
Now that the early 10s dev worship era is officially over, all pretensions of "making the world a better place" and being nice have been dropped and devs shall remember what it feels like to be a replaceable cog that can be swapped the way we used to do with phone wallpapers.
A job is something where you exchange Skills and Time for Money. Most self-respecting creators/workers will not agree to trade Skills, Time, Privacy, Self-esteem for Money.
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?
It seems like every tech company is moving towards the sweatshop model pioneered by CrossOver/Trilogy, treating engineers as human CPUs at best, monitored 24/7.
Growing up we learned about _Slaughterhouse 5_ and _Cat's Cradle_ by Kurt Vonnegut. But there's not enough discussion or awareness of _Player Piano_. Incredibly prescient. These kinds of dystopic headlines are exactly the kind of thing you'd see in the book.
Player Piano is a 1952 Sci-fi novel by Vonnegut which explores the social and economic impact of automation replacing labor. If I recall correctly (I read this 15+ years ago) it is told from the perspective of one of the last people with an actually useful job, a person who's job it is to fix the machines that automated away jobs.
For context, when the article says "a list of work-related apps and websites," this includes Google properties like gmail, docs, etc, and social media websites like Facebook and Instagram, with no provision for excluding personal accounts.
No one intelligent should be logging into their personal accounts on their work devices in any case - it's always been the case (at least in the US) that companies can do whatever invasive scanning they want on devices they own.
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.
Idk, do you think it's sensitive for the employer to train an AI with it and then put that AI on Instagram for everyone to use and ask for employee SSNs?
Yes, but, so what? It isn't a license to train AI on employee personal information.
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.
Yeah automatically assume everything on your work computer is available for your employer to see. And everything you do on your own device when connected to their WiFi or VPN.
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
without a doubt liberty and privacy don't seem to be particularly high up on the list of priorities in the land of the free. Although if the American founders had 24/7 surveilled, compliant, worker drones at mega corporations in mind for an extra check might be worth pondering
If anyone can fingerprint your personal device while literally inside the building, it is Facebook.
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.
Yesterday I was doomscrolling computer vision related stuff on LinkedIn. I hate it, but often looking for freelancing ops in CV. A video appeared in my feed of some South Asian laborers sewing in a garment factory. All of them had cameras mounted on their heads. Otherwise, they looked exactly like you’d imagine beleaguered sweatshop workers would look. Exhausted, dull expressions looking into the camera as whoever was filming the video walked by.
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.
For those saying that this is fine because company computers are company property...
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'.
They have nothing else to do. Someone needs to be able to justify their position by creating stupid changes like this to create a line item on their LinkedIn.
Meanwhile, nobody seems focused on capturing CEO’s data for AI training.
It is going to be funny in a few decades when zuck transfers his shares and voting rights and estate to the ai bot, and makes himself functionally immortal. Or at least a sort of commissioned renaissance painting version of himself, probably.
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.
There was a sci-fi story that explores this idea. The person who wanted to live past their death had to transfer their assets to a trust controlled by the person derived AI (uploaded consciousness in this story) in a roundabout manner. The person was legally dead.
You're just being fatuo- NO THIS ACTUALLY IS GOING TO HAPPEN. IT IS GOING TO HAPPEN. I have no doubt they're shameless enough to literally do this if they could get away with it
Dog fighting is a type of blood sport that turns game and fighting dogs against each other in a physical fight, often to the death, for the purposes of gambling or entertainment to the spectators.[1] In rural areas, fights are often staged in barns or outdoor pits; in urban areas, fights are often staged in garages, basements, warehouses, alleyways, abandoned buildings, neighborhood playgrounds, or in the streets.[2][3] Dog fights usually last until one dog is declared a winner, which occurs when one dog fails to scratch, dies, or jumps out of the pit.[4] Sometimes dog fights end without declaring a winner; for instance, the dog's owner may call off the fight.[4]
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.
Meta is in a different position — these are employees, not customers, and the stated goal is AI training. But the logic is the same: once you've decided the data is useful, the collection feels justified. The question is who gets to decide "useful to whom."
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.
Do most people who work in AI companies realize that if this buildup of reasoning models succeeds at what every tech CEO is aiming for, all of them will be out of a job?
This is one of those interesting “I wonder why” moments in tech. And I’m sure that in five years, this event will be an early symptom of something that will happen.
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.
The thing that gets me is the slope between "we monitor for security" and "we harvest for training data." The first has a clear threat model: here's the data, here's who can access it, here's the retention policy. The second turns the employee into a permanent unpaid contributor to a model they'll never see the weights of. Different economics, even if the capture mechanism is the same. Consent language probably hasn't caught up.
“ 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.”
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.
> human interactions are positive to participants pretty much if and only if those interactions are repeated
> 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.
I agree in both parts. In particular, repeatability is only one part of it, another is in person physical presence, or a weaker form of it - on-screen presence, or at the absolute least - voice.
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.
“ That's why all the work we do in growth is justified. All the questionable contact importing practices. All the subtle language that helps people stay searchable by friends. All of the work we do bring more communication in. The work we will likely have to do in China some day. All of it.”
0) The odds that any of this massive amount of data is ever used by Meta for anything are very low. Less so that anyone will actually look at it, including lawyers.
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)
This is how anthropic captured the code agent so fast. You need training data, users are giving it to you.
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.
And here I am rejecting projects because I refuse to install on my computer closed sourced Chinese VPN my client is requiring, though I told them I could just use built-in Windows VPN or open source Hiddify.
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.
After all the layoffs, labeling people as underperformers while laying off, etc. can they stoop any lower? Why TF would anyone in their right mind would want to join this company?
Wasn't it a few months ago that some engineer leaked that XAI was building 'Human Emulators'. This is either Meta's attempt at the same or just a blatant lie to make sure their engineers aren't slacking off. I've heard the workload has more than doubled for those who weren't laid off which is the only reason I think it might not be a employee monitoring system as I don't think anyone there can afford to not work hard.
Probably aren’t seeing the promised productivity improvements of AI in terms of shipping production code and not just “super demos” that aren’t robust. So they want to see if the withers are really putting in the time or if the models struggle past a level of complexity that stalls or reverses early gains.
Interesting, they know which sites the employee is visiting and they also know the mouse clicks. So they can know exactly which links they are clicking too. They are able to gain visibility even into https sites.
Ironically, I’d be surprised if this wasn’t already the case before? I recall vividly employment contracts with meta in 201X with a clear mention that employees were giving up any sense of privacy while using meta provided devices or entering meta’s premises…
> to improve the company's models in areas where they still struggle, like choosing from dropdown menus and using keyboard shortcuts
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.
Knowing how to make an accessible website is so rare that companies pay me money to do it for them. I wish it was good enough for people, much less companies, to rely on.
Even if no attempt at proper accessibility was made, it's still generally far easier to attempt to find an HTML (or other form of UI) element, than to attempt to scroll to the right spot and use visual inspection to find things.
When you're Meta, "generally" might not be good enough. There are just too many bizarre limitations to this, like image buttons, or interactivity attached to random elements (making a div a link, etc)
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.
When you will think about it, what actually useful data are you getting from this exercise? It is like strapping camera on a manual laborer so you can see what he sees, but you don't get data about the touch and grip and you won't get data about why he is doing specific moves.
Eventually every word spoken as well, which is already the case for most meetings, but not yet for individual interactions. Every bit of information at companies will be accessible to AI. This will allow automation all the way up to the C suite.
for agent agents we have ACP [0] surely their time would be better spent builing this sort of abstraction for computer use then simple teaching an AI to use a mouse?
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?
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.
Seems like Skan AI's solution. They have a few Fortune 500 companies as clients doing exactly the same thing as Meta - capturing keyboard and mouse clicks to ultimately do next level process automation.
Taking dystopia aside, without a lot more context I don't quite get how the captured data will be particularly useful to train models for say software engineering. If someone can shed light - thanks!
I can't imagine a more useless dataset to collect, proving that Meta might have reached the peak of the graph of (reach/grasp)/time and the numerator is about to plummet spectacularly.
for the company that is one of the major players in tracking similar data across the web, i don't see much wrong with this.
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.
I wonder if there's a market for a little usb fob that does nothing but meander the mouse cursor about the screen in a path that, upon proper rendering, would appear to be a ...
From company metrics I have found that developers who make a lot of mouse movements correlate with weaker performance reviews. Something to think about.
At some point, this level of data collection becomes toxic to the survival of the company. I'm floored that Legal keeps approving this given the stakes in future lawsuits.
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.
Culture is often set top down. Look at the current US administration for a public example. People at the top will choose people who agree with them or who are sycophants. Top execs also chose this job and zuck because they have no moral issues with what the company does... Often if you closely associate with someone creepy or immoral it's because you care more about money and power.
That's really only limited to political appointees as far as the US government is concerned. Career civil servants hang around for a long time while their bosses change every 4 to 8 years.
In my experience, a LOT of company culture trickles down from the top. Some of this is by design e.g. CEO consciously and publicly rewards certain traits/behaviors. Some of this is accidental in the sense that CEOs, like many humans, have both stated and expressed preferences.
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).
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??"
There are lots of leaked emails showing Zuck is creepy. Recent one I saw where he is directly in the conversations about targeting teens/children. There's a twitter account [1] that posts emails from tech execs that have come out in legal proceedings - it shows the people at the top are very much informed and driving what happens in their companies.
Thank that 'Super'AILab supervisor from ScaleAI, Alexander Wang; this guy is really hilarious. He directly turned Meta into a Chinese company (just like how ScaleAI exploits its employees), and so far, I haven't seen him deliver anything that matches his annual salary. Considering that what he does is AI infrastructure, even cheap-to-the-point-of-ridiculous cheap labor for training data annotation. I don't think he's suitable for this kind of big-picture AI research.
I suspect most employees know better, but Meta pays very well and they just want to maximize their salary and their tenure in the company. Also it seems Zuckerberg has became more creepy lately, very much in phase with the current Zeigweist.
I've been building tools around screen capture for a bit and every time one of these threads comes up the conversation ends up mushing two things together that aren't actually the same.
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.
Please tell me more. I'm looking at the VIVA and I really don't get why would anybody contribute to the "internal linkedin" and other features. Where did it come from? Where does it go?
Honestly, I doubt this data is as useful as they think.
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.
Judging through a behavioral scientist lenses, this is pretty exciting.
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.
i dont know. plenty of folks are happy to build the prison thinking they'll end up on the right side of the wall because they're paid well enough to think they're part of the capital class.
There is a danger in this. Small companies with delusional people in them will see "how the big guys do it" and try to apply this kind of thing in their own little fart of a business, making our dev/engineer lives miserable.
By all means, they have the right to do so, since those are their assets. For what it's worth, it will give them a good dataset for their agent to improve integration with the browser and operating system.
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!
‘Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said the data collected would not be used for performance assessments or any other purpose’
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?
> Meta (META.O), opens new tab is installing new tracking software on U.S.-based employees’ computers to capture mouse movements, clicks and keystrokes for use in training its artificial-intelligence models, part of a broad initiative to build AI agents that can perform work tasks autonomously, the company told staffers in internal memos seen by Reuters.
> 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.
US mouse movements are obviously very vigilant, some people say they're the strongest mouse movements ever seen.
Since this is a serious website: I'd be genuinely curious how mouse velocity and trajectories differ between cultural and environmental settings
(apart from hardware, that's boring and should be normalized).
There was a time when studies made headlines that were exactly about the relationship between mouse movement, typing etc, and psychiatric disorders as well as physical health.
Obviously, both are related.
If you ask me, Ad tech would probably be able to tell your denominated faith using this data, when there's enough of it...
Genuine question: would right to left language based interfaces have different type of movements and thus training data than left to right language ones?
I'm sure detailed mouse and keystroke data can actually leak health data from subjects. What are the odds one can detect early parkinson disease from mouse wiggle data? If such data leaks away health status, I think capture should be forbidden under current rules.
I’m just saying that they’ve been collecting this info for years. Keyloggers, etc. are on all the computers you’re given. Employees didn’t have any expectation of privacy - just a hope. Now, it’s clear it’s completely gone and so the hope and goodwill is gone.
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.
But this is a good thing. Let me explain.
Imagine a society where an individual’s rights are prioritised and where society is dedicated to the best interests of each citizen (not desires or wants but reasonable considered best interests)
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.
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.
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.
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.
> As much as it's funny to dunk on meta this type of surveillance is becoming the norm.
It already is illegal in developed and civilised countries
Well I see no effort for it in the US. So, keep everyone there in your thoughts and prayers. It's going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
They said developed AND civilized countries...
Yeah the dunk was obvious
This sort of surveillance is only possible in civilized societies.
The workers have always been assets though. They turn JIRA tickets into money. Any notion a company would treat a person as a human being and not a means to an end is unfounded, full-stop. The company is a machine that makes money. Machines do not have feelings.
Right.
https://thecorporation.com/
We live in a society. Worker rights are a thing. Human rights are a thing. This should not be allowed.
Machines don't have feelings. But if a human is subjected to machine treatment there should be safe guards. Otherwise we all may as well live in goo filled tubes like in the matrix. At some point we have to decide what is fair treatment for human beings, similar to how we decide fair treatment for lab rats and lab puppies.
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.
You never really owned what you typed or said at work in to their laptops, into their accounts using their software.
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.
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.
It is even worse in France: if you code open source "on the side" of you work, at home, the company which employs you may claim the copyrights of it. I had to add explicit exclusion of this claim of copyrights in my job contracts to protect my personal work.
That was a few years back, dunno if that was fixed.
That is not correct; assuming you are not using an employer’s equipment on employer’s time, and/or working on what the employer pays you to do for them or are working on something that is competing and a few other reasonable caveats.
It’s actually quite reasonable and logical.
https://french-business-law.com/french-legislation-art/artic...
As far as I was told, this is not enough, you have to add extra legal care, even more if you are on an 'executive' type job contract, and you have to double that if there is "too much" connection/"look-a-like", between the software at work and the open source software you contribute to "at home".
On an french executive like contract, the boundary between "at home" and "at work" is very, very blurry.
AFAIK it's the same in the USA, that's why one of the first questions when interviewing with a company is to ask them about their moonlighting policy if you do want to work on a side project.
> AFAIK it's the same in the USA
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...
This is common in North America too. In Canada, people really should be going through their personal projects and getting a moonlighting clause added before they sign any employment agreements. Employment has gotten tough so a lot of juniors aren’t doing this with their first jobs and we’ll start to see the ramifications of that in about five or ten years.
Can depend on the field too. I work in drug discovery and if the FDA was to request data that requires my computer they would have access to everything I had on it...Including my texts if I happened to log in to my personal apple account since it's a Mac.
That's a very good point, agreed.
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.
Reasonable personal use does not at all in any universe imply privacy from a personal perspective.
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.
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Not having AI companies is reasonable trade off for not having all of my data including full DNA sequence being recorded 24/7 with absolutely zero care of privacy or protection and shared with everyone who has some marginal amount of money to buy it.
Thats... a poorly crafted mumble jumble without any underlying sense, even ignoring insults. Can't handle existence of society where quality of life is higher priority (and you see it on the ground very well) than some sum on account or meaningless titles and rat race achievements or office zero sum games?
I couldn't care less. Statistically I will live longer and be happier than "Live to work" anglo protestant" so I really don' mind about GenAI stuff.
Ignoring the rest of your comment, what the hell did de Gaulle do to you?
Is this supposed to be funny
It's obviously an unwitting parody account. Calling yourself "Der Einzige" while reciting an incoherent script of internet clichés is indistinguishable from satire -- hilariously unintentional parody.
You know, I almost hope you trained an AI to spout off this nonsense because if there’s human cognition involved in this, I’m embarrassed.
Only because you live in a rigged economic system.
Sure, but our employers weren't selling our intermediate contributions to third parties in the past.
I mean, even if there’s no law to handle this it’s a pretty shitty thing to do, don’t you think?
"Companies have shown us that IP going to AI providers is acceptable" This is where I'm expecting future collision; you can't both value IP for it's training value, and yet devalue it for the actual sources of IP (people owning their own likenesses or orgs collecting data from their own activity)
It's going to cause a major break at some point, probably sooner than later.
> Most job offers now come with statements about how you don't have right to your likeness
[citation needed]
It's pretty common, Google it. Here is a website that will help your ai draft job offers with example clauses for it
https://www.lawinsider.com/clause/right-to-use-employees-nam...
I recall that being in my employment contract.
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.
It's true. I think the difference is that now it has slightly different implications as well as scale.
This goes back to 1995 when I was just finishing up grade twelve but it left quite the taste in my mouth. The web industry was just starting to kick off in 1995 and people were opening up web design firms. At the time, young people had part time jobs and while my attempts to pump gas had all ended in rejection, I managed to get a job doing ‘web design’ which at the time meant typing things like <tr> and <td> hundreds of times a page.
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. :)
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.
Former meta employee.
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.
What Meta does (and here I want to be clear that you can replace Meta with Apple, Microsoft, Google, Palantir...) is eventually public knowledge, profusely discussed even on HN. This means substantial amount of people have been aware, for decades.
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?
> 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.
> 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?
Because money is the current representation and approximation of power. It used to be "the yams," but now it's money.
You remind me of my former, younger self and I applaud the appeal you are making to our better selves. All I'm stating is simply that many people don't care, or can't be made to care. But further, there is a pontificating nature about the way you reason about these workers. In the case of my colleagues at Meta, many feel that they are so fortunate to be able to work in the US at all. Even if they did care, it would be rational for them to continue working there against their moral qualms anyways. Because no one would choose to go back to their home country and do the same work for a paltry fraction of the pay.
> 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
An awful lot of Eastern philosophy would disagree with you.
Not speaking philosophically. I'm just talking about my experience on the ground working with chinese (as a fellow chinese). Some of them are interested in global affairs, certainly, but I find it to be more common from people raised in the west.
Was quite tired when i wrote this; just want to be on the record saying that i don't necessarily think that people in the east haphazardly just do whatever they're told. there's more nuance to it than that; but i just observe generally that in the east there isn't a culture of political motivation or organizing, or democracy at all. So it's not at all surprising when people don't assign any political meaning to their work—even in the cases where one so overtly exists.
> 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.
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.
I'm not referring to that, obviously; I'm referring to Metas impacts worldwide.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon him not understanding it
This has nothing to do with politics, or political talk. People's complaints are about dishonesty, abuse, and manipulation on the part of Meta.
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My ex-employer (non-FANGA, but still over $10b mkt cap) started using similar software.
Feels good to read the "ex-"-part in your sentence. It'd be analog to my supervisor sitting right behind me and keeping a super dense protocol - no fucking way, ever.
while not the main reason, I definitely cited it as a reason for departure in my exit interview.
No. It would be best if it included the higher-ups too. I think we all just assume that the c-suite, and anyone who might talk to the legal department, are exempted. And HR (medical info). Or maybe meta is just that stupid that they havent.
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.
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!
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.
Why do you think they don't fully know what they are doing, they are smart folks. Now we all know how everybody needs to be the hero of their story, but self-lying only gets you so far in life, sub-consciousness will give you shit.
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.
I've lived long enough to know that "smart" folks can be extremely dumb.
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.
> 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.
I thought mass quitting in solidarity would happen when programmers realize how their work is used to train AI and replace them. How many quit because of that? Doesn't seem like many.
Apparently, money wins over principles for 99% of us. How is this different and how are we better than Meta employees?
I don't think the two things are comparable. While it would be inconvenient for me personally if I was replaced by AI, it would be an enormous social good as the resources saved could go somewhere else. The same could not be said about everyone under constant surveillance by some megacorp or the government.
Are you so sure that replacing humans is "enormous social good"? For whom is it good, exactly?
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.
I work in a non-profit sector, if they could save money by replacing me they could use the money elsewhere where they desperately need money. So lots of people would benefit. That same principle wouldn't apply if I worked for some mega corp of course.
But the discussion was about Meta employees in general. They're heavily involved in the second type of surveillance that you alude to.
They could help more people but by replacing you they might just create another person who may also need help.
They are somewhat involved but when AI is mentioned Meta's thing is far down the list...
> it would be an enormous social good as the resources saved could go somewhere else
they can, will and are going directly into like 9 sociopath's pockets at your peril.
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.
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.
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.
The tech job market was about 2019 levels a year ago. It's materially worse now.
We are at 2001 dot-com bubble burst levels now, as far as I'm concerned.
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.
So, like an intersection of workers?
This shit's why the industry should have unionized when times were good.
It's not just for pay, it's for pushing back on inhumane horse crap.
More like Metamites amirite?! Annoying af call an exterminator
> metamates
It was metaapes, iirc.
It always happens to the most deserving group of people before it happens to you, and then there's no one to voice any concerns about your own fate, because they all got what you supposed they deserved.
TL;DR: The history of fascism and Nazism in the 1930s Europe.
This argument would be a lot more convincing if it wasn't the people actually doing the surveillance.
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!
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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.
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...
I guess Palantir is cool as long as they keep the queer interest group going
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.
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.
This actually came up with multiple companies I worked at in Sweden. Apparently the law here is quite strict that you _can_ use your computer for personal matters and that your employer is not allowed to spy on you on those matters.
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.
There is no expectation of privacy on your work machine - that's a given.
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.
This may be legally challenging if you’re not allowed to communicate company internal information and especially files outside of company hardware.
> Yes they could have accessed logs before but there’s a difference between directed checking after incidents and active surveillance at scale.
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.
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.
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.
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
Right, it's extraction on steroids. They can no longer extract more from customers, so employees are obviously next.
In a healthy capitalism, you take care of customers, then employees, then shareholders. In that exact order. Right now the incentives are ass-backwards.
Meta employees are not typically known for their deep concerns about privacy.
Don't confuse employees with execs. It's a gigantic company with almost 80k employees.
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's also much less of an undertaking to move companies than move countries
Oh come on, these are some of the highest income earning employed workers on the planet and they have constantly shown they are A-okay with working on systems that enable mass misery, have no qualms against profiting off a genocide, are more than happy to give conference talks on how they implement mass surveillance.
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.
Execs was indeed more of a metaphorical description.
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.
Yeah, if at any time Mark can ask Meta AI ‘which of my employees insulted me today’ for example, that’s wild
I insulted him in my mandatory Exit Interview form from HR when I resigned.
It had no impact of recruiters trying to win me back since then.
In my experience at other companies recruiters and pretty much no one else has any idea that someone has been blacklisted, until you do all of your interviews and tell HR to hire that person and that's when they tell you the person is on some kind of shit list and we can't hire them. That was an awkward conversation with someone who was basically told we'll be making an offer soon.
What is the blacklist and is it company-specific?
I'd be more concerned about industry-wide blacklisting.
No it was company specific. Basically that person used to work for our company, years prior, in a different office in a different country.
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.
Huh. What do you reckon would have happened if you'd hired them anyway?
What? Hiring is a contract between employer (company entity) and employee. No individual "you" can hire anybody except through the company's official process. If HR says "no we won't extend an offer," a lowly HM extending an offer would be clear-cut fraud.
Managers usually have the authority to bind the company to an employment contract. Even if they don't, the rule of "apparent authority" often means the employee can still sue.
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.
>>Managers usually have the authority to bind the company to an employment contract
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.
I believe it happens more often in Canada. Here's a case where the RTO ultimatum was ruled constructive dismissal, because the manager made a verbal agreement to amend the terms of employment.
https://mathewsdinsdale.com/employers-advisor-march-2025/#:~...
I meant what would have happened - and to whom - if HR had greenlighted the offer, but others' posts pretty much clarified that for me, thanks.
Until the day when Zuckerberg meets you, and his Ray Ban glasses profile your face and pull up that comment on your exit interview as pertinent information.
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
As if you would ever be afforded an audience in the first place.
True, was thinking while writing that that was the most unlikely thing in the story which is wild
That’d be a snub to cherish.
> I insulted him in my mandatory Exit Interview form from HR when I resigned.
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?
They can't legally mandate an exit interview, but they sure can pay you for one.
Nothing happens, it’s optional. However if you want to be able to be rehired it doesn’t hurt to do it. It doesn’t take long and you don’t really have to say anything.
Possibly nothing, possibly you'd get blacklisted and they'd share that with other companies in ways in which you'd never know or have any recourse https://fortune.com/2025/03/27/meta-block-list-hiring-employ...
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...
Narcissists often want to get the ones that ran away back to properly destroy them.
Should have framed it. Good job.
He's already got the willing-intern-finder.md skill locked and loaded
All enterprise messaging apps support exporting your DMs today, for legal compliance.
Highly ironic that people who spend their lives building things that invade everyone else's privacy might now whinge about privacy themselves.
I became increasingly irritated at my employer's BYOD policy.
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.
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.
> 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.
Hint: it’s also fiction
I wish. Check out colleagues.ai as the Chinese equivalent of the programme.
That domain is for sale. This whole thread sounds like one of these "I sell ai agents as a saas and make 30k/month" stories.
If that actually replaces your coworker, I feel sorry for everyone.
There shouldn't be any expectation of privacy? There absolutely should!
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
On a work computer? No there shouldn't and isn't.
This is Stockholm syndrome. Sure, you can enforce zero privacy on work computers, it will just lead to shitty work culture and lowered productivity.
I don't see how people using a work computer exclusively for work would lead to a shitty work culture, let alone lowered productivity.
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> 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
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.
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)
That's fine but realize you are not representative of the average tech worker or indeed any white collar worker such as those we are talking about in this post.
As an old hand that's managed many people, I can tell you this is true.
Why not? How about a company-owned toilet? It's their property as well.
You're right, maybe they should put cameras in there too. But there's a reason we don't yet every worker still explicitly or implicitly knows not to use their work computer for personal tasks, as people can and do get fired for doing so.
This is a ridiculous statement. Everyone I know at my company uses work laptops for personal stuff. It's not in the land of freedom though, so great leaders like yourself can't fire people at will.
TBH at this point I don't believe you are a real person.
I stopped doing any personal stuff on a work laptop long time ago, like 10+ years ago. There is absolutely nothing on my work laptop which is not work related. Working from home though helps, I always have my laptop next to me. Same with the phone, under no circumstances I will do anything work related on my personal phone (and yes I do have a company provided phone with MDM and etc).
Consider, do they ever go on explicit websites on that computer? No? Because they know that's surveiled while a personal computer for the same purpose is not. As I said, people do know the difference and might do light personal things like googling something unrelated to work but wouldn't do e.g. banking on a work computer. If they do, well, it'll be their fault if they ever get fired for doing so.
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.
The semi-official policy of my employer in Denmark is you can watch porn on a work computer, so long as you're paying for it. (This reduces the risk of malware etc.)
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.
Most companies just don't have a reason to look through the computer they're letting you use to do your job. Don't give them a reason.
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.
Exactly, no one is stopping one from using their personal devices for any personal purpose, and the fact that somehow people are defending wanting to do personal things on a work laptop is utterly baffling to me. Like another commenter said, I always grew up with the notion, legal and social, that a company laptop is absolutely not your property and companies can and will look through it. Use your own devices for your own tasks.
But surely you could imagine that things work differently in different places.
But the legal notion from where you grew up might not apply worldwide right? People aren't saying you are wrong, they are just saying things are different in other places.
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.
People get fired for banking on a work computer? Whaaat, no way
I'm not American or in America, but I wouldn't use a work laptop for anything personal.
I mean I have my own laptop and phone, why would I use a work device for that stuff?
> 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.
Somehow despite travelling a lot for work, I've never had this happen.
I just do personal stuff on my phone.
Maybe we should also call it labor camp.
I often joke with my family about going back to the salt mine when I leave for work.
I make it a point to use the office bathrooms only to excrete food I ate from the work cafeteria. Personal food I ate at home I excrete in my personal bathroom.
It might surprise you, but culturally, not all companies are this way. I know some are, but some are very different.
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.
That sounds like a truly dystopian take to me, but suppose you're right and nobody should ever use their work computer for anything personal.
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.
Your screenshots go to your managers, not just anyone in the company. At Meta there are very strict safeguards for preventing employees e.g. stalking their exes, so I'd assume the same security is used for even PII filled images.
Bwahaha. The same protections the NSA has?
The ones on the ‘inside’ are doing to 500% of the time I’m sure
I spend the majority of my adult life working, and you're telling me I should spend it surveilled?
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Im pretty surprised you're getting so much flak for this. This is the least controversial opinion I've seen on HN. I've been working for ~30 years, and every job I've had, if you actually looked at the IT policies, they were all very clear that work devices were for work, personal devices were for personal stuff. It wouldn't even occur to me to cross the streams. Carrying a second phone for personal stuff is a trivial burden.
I'm also very surprised, so much so that one of my comments got flagged for it. Seems like it's a few dissenters while others have mentioned concurring with this fact as I also have always been under the impression that work hardware is for work only. And then some people are talking about how it's authoritarian or anti human, like, it's not that deep.
> it's not that deep.
In your view what, if anything, is?
> every job I've had, if you actually looked at the IT policies, they were all very clear that work devices were for work, personal devices were for personal stuff
There's quite a difference between that and zero privacy, and there's also quite a difference between "IT policy says" or "the law permits" and "this is how things ought to be".
That said, between necessary endpoint security and the potential to get caught up in corporate legal disputes I feel like maintaining a strict separation is advisable. But that doesn't mean I support unnecessarily invasive surveillance or think it's a good thing.
You already do and your consent is part of your employment. Check your employee handbook, search for things like "data privacy" and understand how https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ30.pdf applies in the modern world, especially around AI. TL;DR companies can do whatever they want with your work / observe you and you have no real meaningful recourse.
I'm sorry, did God Almighty write the employee handbook?
In most civilized countries you absolutely do have significant rights to privacy on a work computer.
/facepalm If we're going to debate norms and ethics, sending one liners into cyberspace won't get far. There are better ways. Invest in your conversational skills and listening skills, please. Otherwise you are a moth and HN is a streetlamp.
> the work machine is the company's property and there shouldn't be any expectation of privacy.
A bogus argument, methinks. Consider that the company also owns the phones, but can or do they listen to every phone call ?
Or toilets.
If it's a work phone, yes they can.
Yes? And by law so can all US phone companies.
And thanks to a secret interpretation of Section 702 by FISA courts, so can the FBI https://www.cato.org/blog/fisa-reauthorization-fear-mongerin...
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...
> 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.
I am a European in Europe and I expect the same. Why would I assume otherwise? The company laptop is full of spyware, starting from the OS. I have no reason to consider it "mine", and no desire to do so. If I want to do anything private (including things that my company would not like) I can do so from my private devices.
Europe is a big place, but in my area of Europe it is very illegal to monitor employees this way. If you were to be fired for something that illegal surveillance turned up, I would consider it a good thing - with the settlement money you could take a couple years of vacation.
> with the settlement money you could take a couple years of vacation.
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.
I've never worked a software development job where I didn't have a company-provided machine that I installed Linux on. I installed the OS, I have root on the machine, I wiped it and returned it empty when I was leaving the job.
Lucky you, I guess. In all the companies I worked for I have had a company-provided Windows laptop where the OS was managed by IT. The degree of freedom (e.g. what software could I install, what websites were blocksd) varied.
Tbh that's to be expected, the work machine is the company's property and there shouldn't be any expectation of privacy.
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.
No to disagree with you here because I wholly support this position. But I can see the problem from both angles. The problem, it seems to me, is that, and Im not sure which came first, employees started being reckless at work, probably because employers stopped caring about the treatment of their workers, which ramped up the viscous cycle to where we are now.
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.
If "most" employees are corrupt and have terrible ethics, why is the company hiring them in the first place? I don't think I've ever worked anywhere I thought that a majority of my coworkers fit this description. This sounds pretty much identical to what the parent commentee said: it's a hiring problem. Either the company is bad at hiring people who don't have these traits or they're actively selecting for it.
> A handful of engineers were let go as the result of a re-alignment, and their AI counterparts are actively maintaining their code.
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.
For what it’s worth I heard from a manager in Meta that they are doing this too.
>I will give a company the right to try to reproduce my output. But my very likeness and modus operandi? No.
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...
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/work_made_for_hire
https://crownllp.com/blog/what-is-a-work-for-hire/
> 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.
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.
Strong disagree (especially under US law). Consider what this means for union organizing in the context of this 2022 NLRB memo.
> 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...
Sure, and then DOGE exfiltrated their whistleblower database - which is 10x as intimidating.
Wait so the engineers doing novel work are ousted; you fire the engineer that had the skill set to produce the work in the first place? Surely this is creating a Stasi-like neighbour snitching environment with chilling effect where the better you do the faster you become a target for replacement by engineer's incentivized to win points by replacing you. Even being very charitable where the scenario is the code was so poor that the code the employee is working on is so entrenched in domain knowledge they've become a huge bus factor, an LLM is going to make that kind of code worse. I'm struggling to imagine the subset of people this replaces that is not a long term detriment to everyone working there. Those people became "key personnel" for a reason no?
>we are encouraged to create skills.md based on the traits of our colleagues
Like that "Scott is an asswipe who never agrees to any idea that isn't his" or what?
"Unless I suggest it and then he will throw hands against anyone who is against me"
We had the AI = Actually Indians meme, now we have Actually Indians = AI. The loop has been completed!
>A handful of engineers were let go as the result of a re-alignment, and their AI counterparts are actively maintaining their code.
This is exactly what they're doing, and they aren't the only ones.
Just speculating, but the intention wasn't reducing key personnel risk. It was so that your employer could fire them and replace them with an agent running off of their associated skills.md.
Also, the agent doesn’t really work - but that doesn’t matter.
skills.md heh they serialized you into a config file and used it to boot your replacement. could've at least picked a better extension.
a bathroom stall is also a company property. Does the note about not expecting privacy extend there too?
At the risk of sounding like an LLM, a laptop is not just "something you get at work", it's literally your work tool. If you were hired at Shit Producers Inc as a defecator, you'd damn bet they would surveil the bathroom stalls there.
That doesn't mean it's suddenly ok to monitor every second of your life while you work.
That's incredibly creepy tbh
Well, no, there should be an expectation of privacy; an employer shouldn't just be able to have a palantír for their employees.
>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.
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Question: I have heard that at some tech companies that use internal chat software, the general practice is for IT to set it so that the messages are automatically deleted at the end of the day. In Google Chat this is a feature called "turn off history", and the idea behind it is that it can reduce a paper trail when there are investigations into the company doing something that's potentially monopolistic or otherwise shady.
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?
Would require a government willing to hold criminals accountable even after taking bribery into account.
Any fallout or monetary changes you could sue for, a company like Meta can probably pay for and still turn their huge profits. It seems like these companies do little to hide their shady actions at all.
> You’d no longer be able to disent, or discuss anything non-work related with even the slightest expectation of privacy.
One must be a fool to do any of this on any company-owned hardware. Facebook or no Facebook.
I don't know about you, but corporate has a message on my screen before I log in:
"this computer is property of WORK CORP, you have no expectation of private on this computer"
If you want privacy use a personal device....
Here's a wild idea..how about you know just talk?
There was a lot of open dissent on workplace from what I recall.
That's not a bug, that's a feature
Ah, fantastic, gives off Aperture Science (from Half-life 2) vibes!
I've always said if corporations were governments they would be totalitarian fascistic dictatorships. This is just them evolving to their final form. No idea why anyone would want to work at a corporation like Meta by choice the same way I don't understand why anyone would move to North Korea, but I guess the money is just that good.
if you use your work machine at Facebook for dissent, you don't deserve a tech-adjacent job.
In most developed countries, dissent in the workplace is protected by labor laws.
In most developed countries, the workplace punishes it anyway, because they can and it's hard to get the law enforced.
he’s trying to prove he can lick boots even harder
unless if everyone comes together to poison the data set
Imagine discussing anything non-work related through company channels. Why would you do that?
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It's absolutely wild to me that anyone has ever operated under any other assumption. If you want to complain about your boss do it at happy hour.
It's absolutely wild to me that anyone has ever operated under any other assumption.
Maybe because they're aware that complaining about the boss is protected by law (in the United States and many other countries).
It being protected has nothing to do with a presumption of privacy in corporate communications. At a minimum you should be aware that your work related communications are subject to discovery.
It amazes me that people seem to think that once they have clocked in for work they have entered some kind of dystopian dictatorship where all their rights are immediately forfeited. And that people are fundamentally not allowed to push back against this kind of bullshit.
What right is forfeited? The only reasonable assumption to make is that your boss can read everything. Regardless of if you think it is fair or not it is still the safest assumption.
> You’d no longer be able to disent, or discuss anything non-work related with even the slightest expectation of privacy.
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.
While you have the right practical approach, I do believe companies should face harsh regulations preventing this kind of monitoring. It has almost universally negative effects, from enabling union-busting to exploitation to all kinds of discrimination and favoritism.
Union busting is easy to do and hard to prove. This would act as a supporting regulation by making it more difficult. I imagine a legal framework similar to other privacy regulations: nothing about specific software or implementations, but instead new classes of data that are illegal to collect or store about your employees. There is complexity there, but something like mouse movements and keystrokes as described in the article is completely black and white.
>Why do people expect to have a right to do non-work related stuff on the job?
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.
Meta: look, you don't have to wear a diaper while you work, but those that do are 87% more likely to get promoted! The choice is yours!
the fact that the employees have voluntarily consented to wearing the diapers means that wearing the diaper is better than any alternative available to them, which proves that forcing employees to wear diapers maximizes total social utility
It's kind of funny to see how people here are reacting to the world they built when it finally comes to them
It's absolutely their right, but it's a dramatic cultural departure from the history of the company.
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.
What do you think caused the change from being so employee-friendly to so employee-hostile?
I won't pretend to be a mind-reader of the executives involved. I was a line engineer, so effectively watching from the sidelines. It was temporally close to Sheryl Sandberg leaving her role as COO, but I have no insights into how much that was a factor, a reaction, or neither.
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.
They were employee-friendly when they wanted to hire. It's been years of layoffs, with another 10% from May onward.
Engineers build tools for other people. The profession exists in support of human life. We make the substrate that civilization runs on.
If humans are the point, this also goes for keeping work environments humane.
*this is just an observation, not a normative claim
> We make the substrate that civilization runs on.
That's a bit self-aggrandizing - especially for Software engineers.
I did mean engineers in general (I work with and have great respect for mechanical engineers, for example, and my folks were in construction), but I don't it's necessarily self-aggrandizing, either. I've worked on chat software and know people who met using my software and got married and have kids. I've worked on software somewhere in the chain of publishing important ideas, or just to share a joke.
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.
1. But they are not paying for your training which you are bringing to the company. 2. About ranting about company, it is difficult to organize. That's why unions existed, and that's why unions were allowed to meet in work hours.
I cannot understand how can anyone hold such outrageously antihuman beliefs.
Governments, corporations and any other organizations should all exist FOR the people, not the other way around.
American-style capitalism truly is a disease.
So, you're saying if I work at a factory, I should be able to use the factory equipment to build my stuff?
If you work at the factory you should be able to complain about the boss when he's out of earshot without him snooping.
If that's something he cant handle he might have a problem with personal accountability.
I've definitely worked places where I used the company Xerox machine to print up 50,000 "Unionize Now" fliers.
There is no clean separation between personal and work. It is also more efficient to blend them (if I expect a baseline level of non-snoopiness on my work computer, I will text my boyfriend from my work laptop... obviously beneficial for the firm).
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?
> 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).
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.
You would love the world of Severance! Drop your humanity and individuality at the door. Become a mindless drone
Fitting username.
I don’t care if a company monitors which websites I go to on a work computer, what applications I run or what I say on Slack.
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.
Companies pay their employees to build things. They do not pay their employees for their likeliness or the inner workings of their brains. Meta is trying to get the latter by keystroke tracking. It is an overreach in that context.
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.
This comments pairs really well with the song Sixteen Tons - I cued the song[1] and re-read your comment.
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.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1980WfKC0o
You come with a belief, then you wonder why other people don't have the belief. The belief was exogenous for you. Why do you believe the belief is not exogenous for others?
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?
What a pathetic quisling attitude to life.
I really don't understand how this is legal. I guess Facebook maybe doesn't actually have any compliance requirements in the USA, but time series screenshots of any SRE's screen are going to contain data that should not be stored by some data vacuum. I know Meta has a reputation for shitty data handling practices and US regulations are light compared to Europe, but how are they planning on securing passwords, encryption keys, PII, etc. ? Can employees turn this off at their discretion? What happens if someone forgets to turn it off before they cat the companywide ssh root private key? Even setting aside legality, someone with access to this training data would have what sounds like an unacceptably broad level of access to company systems unless Facebook wants to get hacked.
This is legal for most businesses under US law, especially on company devices. And unfortunately not unheard of. Compliance with this data is typically handled in the same way you'd handle any data access situation -- by restricting access to the screencaps to a specific group of people.
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.
I understand the security spyware, though I think it's somewhat questionable there. But this sounds like deliberately putting all of your most sensitive data in a blender and then inevitably letting anyone get a taste of the smoothie.
Just like you'd secure data on a normal internal production system, I'd presume one wouldn't simply let anyone get a taste of the smoothie. But who knows -- move fast and break things, I guess.
This data is going to get leaked in a breach. It will be used against you in a court of law. It will be used for training and (regardless of what anyone says) will be used to fire you once the AI can do your job.
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.
It doesn't have to get leaked. They can sell it and use it as another means to identify Internet users. Meta is pretty infamous for identifying, tracking, and understanding user behavior. We are kind of past the point where these companies care at all. If you think the push to add age verification to operating systems is an unrelated giggle I envy you. Something something Cambridge analytica.
I think it's their employees here that have cause to be concerned, not internet users.
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.
They could perfect it in house and then roll it out as a product. The way people type and use a mouse are pretty identifying especially when coupled with other things.
I do agree screenshots themselves are less useful for that.
That doesn't make any sense.
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.
Are there products that do this with all of the other metadata that meta now collects? At the scale that meta collects them? My guess is no.
I would be highly surprised if they don't do this already for bot detection... but again, if they want to do it to track people on the internet, the data that would be useful is data from the internet, which they have an incredible wealth of -- not a dataset that is several orders of magnitude smaller from their internal employees' desktops.
Same with employee surveys, BTW.
Never trust that you are anonymous.
All psychological experiments that loosely relates to Web became default legal when A/B tests became normalized after Google started it. It is not something that may be covered by blanket waivers. It's something that require participation under free will and independent review boards and such. For every single one of those little tests.
The cat is out of the bag, but that doesn't mean it's a non-issue.
Yeah, this is crazy, remember when engineers were actually engineers and that meant something? Imagine asking to install spyware on your lawyers' firms' company laptops because you didn't trust them not to make some deal with the judge. Or demanding 24 hour monitoring on everything a doctor does because you need to review the footage at any time.
EDIT: While we are here, let's do this for politicians as well :), publicly available, auditable 24-hour surveillance.
> let's do this for politicians as well :), publicly available, auditable 24-hour surveillance
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.
> Politicians will be the first to carve out exceptions for themselves for reasons of "security" while everyone else is surveilled.
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.
If we are living in a democracy and in majority are able to live democracy, then yes. If on the other hand most people are not willing or unable to live democracy, then we will get stuck with corruption.
How do you remove them?
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Of the examples you listed, politicians are the only ones you directly fund and supposedly work for you. Your lawyers and doctors aren’t your employees, and they also don’t work on your property (though lawyers might handle your documents). The biggest thing this points to is that the mask is almost entirely off between employee-employer relationships in the US, and it looks like by ensuring everyone depended on employment for insurance before turning this corner, there’s not much resistance left.
This is why a worker's rights movement is important. You shouldn't have to rely on your employer's goodwill. Reasonable privacy rights on work equipment should be guaranteed by law, and any large company should have a Euro-style worker's council.
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.
Notably, I’ve had several lawyers sell me out. It’s not the emails, but the phone calls you need to worry about.
Can add any detail to "sell you out"? Was it explicit violation of expected privacy of the conversation?
Active conspiracy with opposing counsel to drag it out, avoid obvious resolutions, etc.
Extremely common with divorce attorneys - and labor law.
That sounds actionable if your lawyer (that you're paying) isn't actually working for you.
Wait until you talk to the state Bar. That is when the real fuckery starts.
Good luck getting a lawyer to sue another lawyer either.
Do you have proof or at least some evidence?
.... I'm not the person you're asking but I can give curious anecdata on a home purchase....
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.
Hmmm. Property purchase agreements are rather different in your neck of the woods than mine!
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.
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Of course. They really didn’t like that.
How do you mean? They violated attorney-client privelege?
> Imagine asking to install spyware on your lawyers' firms' company laptops because you didn't trust them not to make some deal with the judge.
This sounds unironically a good idea.
>data collected would not be used for performance assessments or any other purpose besides model training
And you expect Meta employees, of all people, to believe this?
These are the same employees that willfully code the largest spy network on the planet, so it seems like they are willing to believe a lot
Are they merging with Palantir any time soon?
I'd argue Meta is much worse:
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.
> When Palantir helps USG spy on the planet the primary purpose is defeat enemies + protect assets.
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.
Does Palantir collect data or just analyze aggregated purchased data? I'm not familiar with the data collecting SDKs available as I don't whore out myself/my sites like that, so maybe there is a pipe directly from them????
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
> Does Palantir collect data or just analyze aggregated purchased data?
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.
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.
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...
Those are legitimate grievances as mentioned, what they are not is Palantir themselves collecting massive amounts of data, which is often what they're portrayed as doing and what the GP asked about.
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Meta people used to protest and demand Thiel be removed from the board all the time, in the 2010s. But it’s probably not like that anymore.
Everyone that’s left either buys into the culture or is stuck due to immigration
Or stuck with HCOL that is the Bay Area. There’s not really any purely “ethical” companies in the Bay Area that pay enough for you to live there.
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.
Medical device companies are run very differently from most technology development companies. They have to be because the stakes are high, evaluation criteria are different, and medical related marketing and sales have separate industry managed channels and venues.
You have to be very good at pretending to land director and above roles, though.
The very top is lying all the time about what they believe...
fun fact: they all made above $1-2 million, some even a lot more via meta stock. so after that they stopped doing that kind of thing. ethics can be bought it just have different price everyone.
In the midst of their 4th straight year of layoffs with another looming 20% cut coming, I'm guessing Meta employees are a tiny but suspicious.
Does not matter? I think the high compensation will be what will drive the compliance.
As true as "It's free and always will be".
Yeah, it is complete bullshit. Even if they don't do it straight away, once they have the spyware in place, it's only a matter before they do. It is Meta after all.
It will be interesting to see how the people who maintain (in my opinion) one of the worst offending organizations out there for invading your privacy - and generally treating you in a manner that lacks human decency - respond to having their privacy invaded, and being treated without basic decency.
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.
I like to imagine they’ll mostly capture meta employees using AIs to do work.
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!!”
I am to speculate that they are going to use this as an excuse to let people go without doing mass layoffs and having to pay severance. Training AI is just an excuse.
Many many moons ago I refused to implement a calendar event scraping system at Meta where it would look at all of your meetings on the calendar and do "analysis". IDK what ever happened to that task, I assume it died a death of no one else being willing to do it. This was probably 2011 or so, I can only imagine it has gotten so much worse.
It's pretty easy to scrape your own calendar events in Meta. I'm not sure about others' as I'm not a manager, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were visible as long as someone is in your report chain.
(I work at Meta)
It's been a while so I don't remember the specifics, but the I think the request came from someone working at Accenture from one of the FinTech teams? At the time the proposal had both technical limitations and performance implications on top of the privacy issues. To do it right would have meant standing up a new set of client exchange endpoints and permissions that were far too permissive so the task just got ignored for a long time and I think that manager behind it went away eventually or they settled for public data inside the company.
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.
White collar firms with a reputation for paying well don’t cheap out on severance. It’s a cheap way to get employees to sign some stuff reducing the risk of lawsuits, plus their unemployment insurance premiums stay lower.
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.
> White collar firms with a reputation for paying well don’t cheap out on severance
Tell that to Elon Musk and Twitter employees.
Musk saddled that company with an additional billion in debt interest payments every year so they were in a cash crunch.
Oh is that the excuse why the billionaire couldn't afford to pay out pennies?
I'm not defending it I'm just explaining how badly they mismanaged it lol
> I like to imagine they’ll mostly capture meta employees using AIs to do work.
This will also give them data on which employees aren't using AI enough, and then they'll be PIP'd or let go.
While it would be a hilarious failure mode to encounter, this is actually a good thing!
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.
Doesn't this assume that what humans are current doing with LLM agents is working out? Isn't it a bit early to bet on that to this degree?
Not when all of the marketing of LLMs is touting their abilities to do the exact thing and that is what investors are being presented.
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.
Breaknews: Meta makes the ultimate AI version of "Cat sits on your keyboard" simulator
Every day I grow more and more glad that I turned down a Meta offer. It was probably a hire-to-fire offer anyway, not based on any engineering prowess on my part. Still, I couldn't be more relieved I dodged that bullet.
Now this is some hacker news.
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.
It really does make one wonder... If you came to work tomorrow and I said you need to donate blood to keep working here, would you?
In this economy?
Count dracula over here talking about the blood shortages
Next gen AI is going to become really proficient in scrolling Hacker News.
Or high speed switching between a dozen workspaces across multiple monitors and 100s of chrome tabs.
The first thing many people do after installing OpenClaw is summarize Hacker News
me too btw :P
So, back in 2021, I supervised a student project where we aimed to simulate human interaction with the browser. Obviously, we needed data on human interaction. After discussion, we ruled out collecting data from a group because:
- 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.
What toxic trash.
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.
The way you fight this is to get another job. At this point all jobs in big tech are just temp jobs anyways. Eventually the reality of this will sink in and the smart people necessary to power this company will invest time into career paths that pay a lot but more reliably.
"will invest time into career paths that pay a lot but more reliably."
What, pray tell, might those be?
I'm so happy that EU and UK have laws against this kind of thing and so I will still be able to work somewhere in the future(TBD what future means, though).
Makes me think of how the US army trains their waterboarders: by waterboarding them first.
The goal is to manufacture a lack of empathy along the lines of: "why should I treat this person better than I was treated".
You'd think the natural result would be 'This was horrible; this trainer is a psychopath. I am not going to do that to another human being.'
But then, we're talking about humans, especially the violence-enjoying strata of humans here.
That is the natural result. They're selecting for people that don't have that reaction, or those that can suppress it.
Just like chefs... a lot of lowlives lurk there too.
Wut? How are chefs like waterboarders?
presumably they were abused as line cooks or whatever and once they make sous chefs they become abusers. Similar dynamics exist in jail, in fraternities, etc.
Original source: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
Now that the early 10s dev worship era is officially over, all pretensions of "making the world a better place" and being nice have been dropped and devs shall remember what it feels like to be a replaceable cog that can be swapped the way we used to do with phone wallpapers.
A job is something where you exchange Skills and Time for Money. Most self-respecting creators/workers will not agree to trade Skills, Time, Privacy, Self-esteem for Money.
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?
It seems like every tech company is moving towards the sweatshop model pioneered by CrossOver/Trilogy, treating engineers as human CPUs at best, monitored 24/7.
Growing up we learned about _Slaughterhouse 5_ and _Cat's Cradle_ by Kurt Vonnegut. But there's not enough discussion or awareness of _Player Piano_. Incredibly prescient. These kinds of dystopic headlines are exactly the kind of thing you'd see in the book.
Player Piano is a 1952 Sci-fi novel by Vonnegut which explores the social and economic impact of automation replacing labor. If I recall correctly (I read this 15+ years ago) it is told from the perspective of one of the last people with an actually useful job, a person who's job it is to fix the machines that automated away jobs.
For context, when the article says "a list of work-related apps and websites," this includes Google properties like gmail, docs, etc, and social media websites like Facebook and Instagram, with no provision for excluding personal accounts.
No one intelligent should be logging into their personal accounts on their work devices in any case - it's always been the case (at least in the US) that companies can do whatever invasive scanning they want on devices they own.
Meta forces employees to use personal Facebook accounts at work.
Everyone here is slightly wrong.
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.
Cool that they don't let others do it. I tried to make a work fb account to access the hellscape that is business manager and they blocked it. Pricks.
This hasn’t been true for 8+ years.
Having both a personal and work Facebook account is against the rules and may lead to getting the account suspended.
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They absolutely do, wtf are you talking about.
Also people use their work accounts and laptops to read their w2 and other sensitive info.
It at least used to be true. In order to accept the job offer, you would have to make (or have) a Facebook account.
The W2 is already provided by the employer, is it really sensitive for the employer to see it?
Idk, do you think it's sensitive for the employer to train an AI with it and then put that AI on Instagram for everyone to use and ask for employee SSNs?
At meta your personal FB account is your work account. I had to create one to get paid. It’s the same identity used in internal systems.
Yes, but, so what? It isn't a license to train AI on employee personal information.
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 know you are at work and monitored.
You can browser personal accounts from your phone.
Yeah automatically assume everything on your work computer is available for your employer to see. And everything you do on your own device when connected to their WiFi or VPN.
I’m surprised this needs to be said out loud.
>You know you are at work and monitored.
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
- workplace being monitored (US)
- getting paid half the salary (EU)
I know which one most people pick.
without a doubt liberty and privacy don't seem to be particularly high up on the list of priorities in the land of the free. Although if the American founders had 24/7 surveilled, compliant, worker drones at mega corporations in mind for an extra check might be worth pondering
on your phone not connected to corp wifi
That doesn't matter anymore unless they have an SSL proxy. If you have ECH/ODoH anyway.
If anyone can fingerprint your personal device while literally inside the building, it is Facebook.
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.
Lots of those these days. Zacaler has a fair amount of enterprise market penetration.
And Ideally not connected to company WiFi
Yesterday I was doomscrolling computer vision related stuff on LinkedIn. I hate it, but often looking for freelancing ops in CV. A video appeared in my feed of some South Asian laborers sewing in a garment factory. All of them had cameras mounted on their heads. Otherwise, they looked exactly like you’d imagine beleaguered sweatshop workers would look. Exhausted, dull expressions looking into the camera as whoever was filming the video walked by.
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.
> Yesterday I was doomscrolling computer vision related stuff on LinkedIn
blink twice if you need help
We’ve built a global economic system around “make number go up”, and we have been insanely successful at it - at the cost of everything else.
For those saying that this is fine because company computers are company property...
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'.
> 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.
I believe this has been the reality of diamond mining.
Which has also long been associated with inhumane labor practices, including slavery.
They have nothing else to do. Someone needs to be able to justify their position by creating stupid changes like this to create a line item on their LinkedIn.
Meanwhile, nobody seems focused on capturing CEO’s data for AI training.
The same company is trying to build an AI Zuckerberg...
It is going to be funny in a few decades when zuck transfers his shares and voting rights and estate to the ai bot, and makes himself functionally immortal. Or at least a sort of commissioned renaissance painting version of himself, probably.
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.
There was a sci-fi story that explores this idea. The person who wanted to live past their death had to transfer their assets to a trust controlled by the person derived AI (uploaded consciousness in this story) in a roundabout manner. The person was legally dead.
Edit “Mr. Boy”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Boy
You're just being fatuo- NO THIS ACTUALLY IS GOING TO HAPPEN. IT IS GOING TO HAPPEN. I have no doubt they're shameless enough to literally do this if they could get away with it
Not funny ha-ha though.
Meta going all in on their brand with this.
Someone had to do it, distasteful though it may be. Could be quite hilarious what it learns in the process.
That people watch TikTok instead of Instagram reels. Quite embarrassing.
It would be really embarrassing if this is what it takes to come to that realization rather than the same way the rest of the world does.
I bet this doesn't include higher management. Wonder why.
btw. There should be a word like dogfooding but for AI training.
Dogtraining? Dogwalking? Dogfeeding?
Dog fighting is a type of blood sport that turns game and fighting dogs against each other in a physical fight, often to the death, for the purposes of gambling or entertainment to the spectators.[1] In rural areas, fights are often staged in barns or outdoor pits; in urban areas, fights are often staged in garages, basements, warehouses, alleyways, abandoned buildings, neighborhood playgrounds, or in the streets.[2][3] Dog fights usually last until one dog is declared a winner, which occurs when one dog fails to scratch, dies, or jumps out of the pit.[4] Sometimes dog fights end without declaring a winner; for instance, the dog's owner may call off the fight.[4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_fighting
UNIONIZE. If it’s not obvious to you now, it never will be.
Much harder to get the ball rolling on unionization when AI can monitor all chats/interactions for any mentioned of the topic
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.
Do most people who work in AI companies realize that if this buildup of reasoning models succeeds at what every tech CEO is aiming for, all of them will be out of a job?
Yes! That is exactly why they talk about "the permeant underclass" and hold onto their RSUs.
It is the case with most companies, that once you build something for them, you are out of a job.
It is pretty obvious they won't succeed at that with LLMs.
They don't even understand what these people do.
It is delusion and lies all around.
If it is available for training, I assume it is available for discovery.
As everybody knows, key strokes and mouse movements are the things that solve problems, definitely the data worth capturing for AI training.
Maybe they're building a simulation of the rich lives and behaviors of white collar office people in the early 21th century, with breathtaking detail?
I couldn't imagine life without my unique keystrokes and mouse movements.
Like a museum exhibit?
But you can put on 3D goggles, maybe there's even TTS narration.
Some call it museumverse.
This is one of those interesting “I wonder why” moments in tech. And I’m sure that in five years, this event will be an early symptom of something that will happen.
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.
The thing that gets me is the slope between "we monitor for security" and "we harvest for training data." The first has a clear threat model: here's the data, here's who can access it, here's the retention policy. The second turns the employee into a permanent unpaid contributor to a model they'll never see the weights of. Different economics, even if the capture mechanism is the same. Consent language probably hasn't caught up.
Because ends justify means. To quote Boz himself:
“ 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.”
> connect more people more often is de facto good
i've heard it described that evil is that which believes itself to be good without exception. i think i'm starting to agree...
“Good” for their bottom line, not for the people.
While reality can be anything but.
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.
> human interactions are positive to participants pretty much if and only if those interactions are repeated
> 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.
I agree in both parts. In particular, repeatability is only one part of it, another is in person physical presence, or a weaker form of it - on-screen presence, or at the absolute least - voice.
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.
“ That's why all the work we do in growth is justified. All the questionable contact importing practices. All the subtle language that helps people stay searchable by friends. All of the work we do bring more communication in. The work we will likely have to do in China some day. All of it.”
0) The odds that any of this massive amount of data is ever used by Meta for anything are very low. Less so that anyone will actually look at it, including lawyers.
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)
How is this supposed to improve productivity? I'm still struggling with the framing of the business productivity gained from this?
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.
this would be a good time for Meta employees to reconsider their life choices.
This is how anthropic captured the code agent so fast. You need training data, users are giving it to you.
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.
And here I am rejecting projects because I refuse to install on my computer closed sourced Chinese VPN my client is requiring, though I told them I could just use built-in Windows VPN or open source Hiddify.
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.
After all the layoffs, labeling people as underperformers while laying off, etc. can they stoop any lower? Why TF would anyone in their right mind would want to join this company?
They pay well. That’s it. That’s the only argument for working for facebook.
They don’t add anything beneficial to society. They exist to sell ads.
Their VR tech is pretty nice. No one sells anything anywhere near as cheap and good as the Quest 3S.
big prestige from people who still thing facebook/instagram are positives in the world i guess
Wasn't it a few months ago that some engineer leaked that XAI was building 'Human Emulators'. This is either Meta's attempt at the same or just a blatant lie to make sure their engineers aren't slacking off. I've heard the workload has more than doubled for those who weren't laid off which is the only reason I think it might not be a employee monitoring system as I don't think anyone there can afford to not work hard.
So happy I decline to even start the Meta interview cycles. The company seemed ridiculous even back then, but this is next level.
I guess this is why they acquired https://www.limitless.ai/ ?
Training on future vi macros. Just
Taking screenshots too.Everybody will be a serf under technofeudalism.
technofeudalism
Technofascism.
Fixed it.
Meta employees it's time to raid the kitchen and head for the exit ASAP. Maybe to team Flock
People are just being misused to train their own replacement.
Always thought Meta was a god awful run company and this just brings home the cake
Probably aren’t seeing the promised productivity improvements of AI in terms of shipping production code and not just “super demos” that aren’t robust. So they want to see if the withers are really putting in the time or if the models struggle past a level of complexity that stalls or reverses early gains.
At this rate they're not going to need to do layoffs.. nobody sane is going to want to work there.
Interesting, they know which sites the employee is visiting and they also know the mouse clicks. So they can know exactly which links they are clicking too. They are able to gain visibility even into https sites.
Ironically, I’d be surprised if this wasn’t already the case before? I recall vividly employment contracts with meta in 201X with a clear mention that employees were giving up any sense of privacy while using meta provided devices or entering meta’s premises…
Why do we allow this?
> to improve the company's models in areas where they still struggle, like choosing from dropdown menus and using keyboard shortcuts
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.
Knowing how to make an accessible website is so rare that companies pay me money to do it for them. I wish it was good enough for people, much less companies, to rely on.
Even if no attempt at proper accessibility was made, it's still generally far easier to attempt to find an HTML (or other form of UI) element, than to attempt to scroll to the right spot and use visual inspection to find things.
When you're Meta, "generally" might not be good enough. There are just too many bizarre limitations to this, like image buttons, or interactivity attached to random elements (making a div a link, etc)
a CLI with a man page should already be usable by an LLM.
Meta is like Big Brother in the novel 1984 now.
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.
When you will think about it, what actually useful data are you getting from this exercise? It is like strapping camera on a manual laborer so you can see what he sees, but you don't get data about the touch and grip and you won't get data about why he is doing specific moves.
More accurately learn which employees are inactive while WFH
I dont actually think its for training AI models. AI is the scapegoat - just like the layoffs
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47851242
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47851086
Eventually every word spoken as well, which is already the case for most meetings, but not yet for individual interactions. Every bit of information at companies will be accessible to AI. This will allow automation all the way up to the C suite.
I wonder if this screen + mouse + keyboard (+ camera + speaker + mic) interface is really the right level of abstraction to model a “digital entity”
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?
It's the same approach as Windows Recall, but all data remains sovereign to the company generating it.
for agent agents we have ACP [0] surely their time would be better spent builing this sort of abstraction for computer use then simple teaching an AI to use a mouse?
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?
[0] https://zed.dev/blog/acp-registry
I'm so excited to interview for a career at Meta!
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.
I assume meta is doing this to train use computer like capabilities
Seems like Skan AI's solution. They have a few Fortune 500 companies as clients doing exactly the same thing as Meta - capturing keyboard and mouse clicks to ultimately do next level process automation.
Taking dystopia aside, without a lot more context I don't quite get how the captured data will be particularly useful to train models for say software engineering. If someone can shed light - thanks!
for software engineering? not because of the typing.
the signal is every time a human has to grab the wheel. that's a label for what the agent still misses.
They have a lot of internal tools. My guess is that it’s to train the model to click around the internal tools
I can't imagine a more useless dataset to collect, proving that Meta might have reached the peak of the graph of (reach/grasp)/time and the numerator is about to plummet spectacularly.
for the company that is one of the major players in tracking similar data across the web, i don't see much wrong with this.
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.
I wonder if there's a market for a little usb fob that does nothing but meander the mouse cursor about the screen in a path that, upon proper rendering, would appear to be a ...
This should be made illegal as soon as possible.
This is clearly and obviously the shortest possible path to a total surveillance society.
From company metrics I have found that developers who make a lot of mouse movements correlate with weaker performance reviews. Something to think about.
Could a few of the smart people there please find a way to poison this data set? Before something similar ends up on my work computer.
Relevant story (Manna)
https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
At some point, this level of data collection becomes toxic to the survival of the company. I'm floored that Legal keeps approving this given the stakes in future lawsuits.
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.
What would be the wxact opposite of Meta as a company? Small, privacy focused, HN blacklisted at work? Am I missing something?
Low pay, to be fair.
Honest question, does most of Meta's creepiness trickle down directly from Zuckerberg, or is their entire executive also this creepy?
Does the executive know better at this point but have toasted the culture and no one can fight against it anymore?
Culture is often set top down. Look at the current US administration for a public example. People at the top will choose people who agree with them or who are sycophants. Top execs also chose this job and zuck because they have no moral issues with what the company does... Often if you closely associate with someone creepy or immoral it's because you care more about money and power.
That's really only limited to political appointees as far as the US government is concerned. Career civil servants hang around for a long time while their bosses change every 4 to 8 years.
In my experience, a LOT of company culture trickles down from the top. Some of this is by design e.g. CEO consciously and publicly rewards certain traits/behaviors. Some of this is accidental in the sense that CEOs, like many humans, have both stated and expressed preferences.
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??"
There are lots of leaked emails showing Zuck is creepy. Recent one I saw where he is directly in the conversations about targeting teens/children. There's a twitter account [1] that posts emails from tech execs that have come out in legal proceedings - it shows the people at the top are very much informed and driving what happens in their companies.
[1] https://x.com/TechEmails
> is their entire executive also this creepy?
What does this link tell you? https://www.thedailybeast.com/facebooks-sheryl-sandberg-told...
Thank that 'Super'AILab supervisor from ScaleAI, Alexander Wang; this guy is really hilarious. He directly turned Meta into a Chinese company (just like how ScaleAI exploits its employees), and so far, I haven't seen him deliver anything that matches his annual salary. Considering that what he does is AI infrastructure, even cheap-to-the-point-of-ridiculous cheap labor for training data annotation. I don't think he's suitable for this kind of big-picture AI research.
I suspect most employees know better, but Meta pays very well and they just want to maximize their salary and their tenure in the company. Also it seems Zuckerberg has became more creepy lately, very much in phase with the current Zeigweist.
Maybe this is exactly why Meta poached Alexandr Wang. Data capturing is an heirloom technique passed down from his Scale AI days
This is....ridiculous. Does Meta also capture it's CEOs movements with such fidelity?
https://archive.is/TYcpI
Do they get each own Meta ray ban grasses as well that they have to wear at all time even in bathrooms?
"start"
They 'trust me'. Dumb f*ks.
I definitely see a strong demand for a 11” 1kg macbook with these policies inevitably spreading.
Meta employees to start using AI to make fake mouse movements, keystrokes while goofing off.
If anyone still has not watched Severance, it is good time to start watching that show!
Can anybody else hear it? the world smallest violin.
It will be funny when the AI learns to browse Reddit and watch porn during the work day.
The irony of this is so strange..
With this data, meta can make metahumans which pass recaptcha for real.
If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear? Right?
I've been building tools around screen capture for a bit and every time one of these threads comes up the conversation ends up mushing two things together that aren't actually the same.
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.
Microsoft was also doing the same in their VIVA program.
Please tell me more. I'm looking at the VIVA and I really don't get why would anybody contribute to the "internal linkedin" and other features. Where did it come from? Where does it go?
Time to leave tech forever and farm onions, I think.
fines are negligible for these companies, so i also expect these policies to be applied to eu employees without telling them
Meta can even afford to destroy themselves and their own employees.
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.
Honestly, I doubt this data is as useful as they think.
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.
Gotta feed the beast some how.
Judging through a behavioral scientist lenses, this is pretty exciting.
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.
how to cause a mass exodus with this one simple trick!
i dont know. plenty of folks are happy to build the prison thinking they'll end up on the right side of the wall because they're paid well enough to think they're part of the capital class.
There is a danger in this. Small companies with delusional people in them will see "how the big guys do it" and try to apply this kind of thing in their own little fart of a business, making our dev/engineer lives miserable.
I can’t imagine being mad that the data collection company that I work for now wants data on _me_
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.
Another alt link: https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-new-ai-tool-tracks-staf...
By all means, they have the right to do so, since those are their assets. For what it's worth, it will give them a good dataset for their agent to improve integration with the browser and operating system.
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!
Normalizing this shit is more evil than anything too. Really classy overlords strikes again.
The engineers who implement this should be ashamed of themselves.
‘Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said the data collected would not be used for performance assessments or any other purpose’
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 mean - uh - gotta find all the signals that may exist.
I...admire the diligence
1984 level sickening.
Hey fellow engineers.
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.
Meta should go and pound sand.
Capitalist tech bros have lost their marbles at this point.
Fucking insane.
Optimizing ourselves to death.
Capitalism is asleep at the wheel with its foot stuck on the gas pedal.
Zuck's a sociopath
> Meta (META.O), opens new tab is installing new tracking software on U.S.-based employees’ computers to capture mouse movements, clicks and keystrokes for use in training its artificial-intelligence models, part of a broad initiative to build AI agents that can perform work tasks autonomously, the company told staffers in internal memos seen by Reuters.
> 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)_/¯
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Is US mouse movement different from European? Is it called sparkling mouse movement if it comes from California?
US mouse movements are obviously very vigilant, some people say they're the strongest mouse movements ever seen.
Since this is a serious website: I'd be genuinely curious how mouse velocity and trajectories differ between cultural and environmental settings (apart from hardware, that's boring and should be normalized).
There was a time when studies made headlines that were exactly about the relationship between mouse movement, typing etc, and psychiatric disorders as well as physical health.
Obviously, both are related.
If you ask me, Ad tech would probably be able to tell your denominated faith using this data, when there's enough of it...
Genuine question: would right to left language based interfaces have different type of movements and thus training data than left to right language ones?
Not sure how GDPR could help. They can make generating data for their model your actual job as per contract I guess.
I'm sure detailed mouse and keystroke data can actually leak health data from subjects. What are the odds one can detect early parkinson disease from mouse wiggle data? If such data leaks away health status, I think capture should be forbidden under current rules.
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As everybody knows, key strokes and mouse movements are the things that solve problems, definitely the data worth capturing for AI training.
See: https://si.inc/posts/fdm1/
If they captured display output as well, it could be a very useful dataset for generalized computer use.
They used to say the same thing about text, it turned out that after all training the best thing they could achieve is the `ccc` compiler.
Data collection isn’t new. The training is.
You don't think collecting this type of intimate information about your employees as a major violation of the social contract?
I’m just saying that they’ve been collecting this info for years. Keyloggers, etc. are on all the computers you’re given. Employees didn’t have any expectation of privacy - just a hope. Now, it’s clear it’s completely gone and so the hope and goodwill is gone.
> Keyloggers, etc. are on all the computers you’re given.
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.
Right, they're not the only FAANG company for which we know they're doing it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46318494
But this is a good thing. Let me explain. Imagine a society where an individual’s rights are prioritised and where society is dedicated to the best interests of each citizen (not desires or wants but reasonable considered best interests)
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 …