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

• aanet 5mo ago
  > 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)_/¯
• turtleyacht 5mo ago
  Training on future vi macros. Just kk1Gi// file.js<Esc>M/func<Enter>o let<Esc>`` Taking screenshots too.
• dbgrman 5mo ago
  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?
  • hightrix 5mo ago
    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.
    • kingstnap 5mo ago
      Their VR tech is pretty nice. No one sells anything anywhere near as cheap and good as the Quest 3S.
  • kkarakk 5mo ago
    big prestige from people who still thing facebook/instagram are positives in the world i guess
  • deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
• xvxvx 5mo ago
  ‘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.
• general1465 5mo ago
  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.
  • Ancalagon 5mo ago
    I dont actually think its for training AI models. AI is the scapegoat - just like the layoffs
  • lelandfe 5mo ago
    More accurately learn which employees are inactive while WFH
• instig007 5mo ago
  As everybody knows, key strokes and mouse movements are the things that solve problems, definitely the data worth capturing for AI training.
  • wolttam 5mo ago
    See: https://si.inc/posts/fdm1/ https://si.inc/posts/fdm1/ If they captured display output as well, it could be a very useful dataset for generalized computer use.
    • instig007 5mo ago
      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.
• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
• instig007 5mo ago
  As everybody knows, key strokes and mouse movements are the things that solve problems, definitely the data worth capturing for AI training.
  • moritzwarhier 5mo ago
    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.
    • hackable_sand 5mo ago
      Like a museum exhibit?
      • moritzwarhier 5mo ago
        But you can put on 3D goggles, maybe there's even TTS narration. Some call it museumverse.
• sharts 5mo ago
  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.
  • ndegruchy 5mo ago
    The same company is trying to build an AI Zuckerberg...
    • asdff 5mo ago
      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.
      • pigeons 5mo ago
        Not funny ha-ha though.
      • alex1138 5mo ago
        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
      • le-mark 5mo ago
        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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Boy
• toomanyrichies 5mo ago
  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.
• Grappelli 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  • oytis 5mo ago
    Not sure how GDPR could help. They can make generating data for their model your actual job as per contract I guess.
    • Qem 5mo ago
      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.
  • onlypassingthru 5mo ago
    Is US mouse movement different from European? Is it called sparkling mouse movement if it comes from California?
    • busymom0 5mo ago
      Genuine question: would right to left language based interfaces have different type of movements and thus training data than left to right language ones?
    • moritzwarhier 5mo ago
      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...
• wrs 5mo ago
  >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?
  • mmkos 5mo ago
    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.
  • orangecoffee 5mo ago
    Does not matter? I think the high compensation will be what will drive the compliance.
  • anonym00se1 5mo ago
    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.
  • dylan604 5mo ago
    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
    • HoldOnAMinute 5mo ago
      Are they merging with Palantir any time soon?
      • kridsdale1 5mo ago
        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.
        • wonnage 5mo ago
• tristanj 5mo ago
  Original source: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/meta-start-capturing-employee-mouse-movements-keystrokes-ai-training-data-2026-04-21/ https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
• bradlys 5mo ago
  Data collection isn’t new. The training is.
  • shimman 5mo ago
    You don't think collecting this type of intimate information about your employees as a major violation of the social contract?
    • bradlys 5mo ago
      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.
      • peacebeard 5mo ago
        > 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-surveillance-workplace/ 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.
      • kpw94 5mo ago
        Right, they're not the only FAANG company for which we know they're doing it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46318494 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46318494
• arghandugh 5mo ago
  [dead]
• jmull 5mo ago
  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!!”
  • arjvik 5mo ago
    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.
    • bwestergard 5mo ago
      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?
      • dylan604 5mo ago
        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.
  • darth_avocado 5mo ago
    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.
    • lotsofpulp 5mo ago
• travelalberta 5mo ago
  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.
• nitwit005 5mo ago
  > 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.
  • lelandfe 5mo ago
    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.
    • nitwit005 5mo ago
      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.
      • lelandfe 5mo ago
        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)
  • laweijfmvo 5mo ago
    a CLI with a man page should already be usable by an LLM.
• loeg 5mo ago
  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.
  • tmp10423288442 5mo ago
    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.
    • __loam 5mo ago
      Meta forces employees to use personal Facebook accounts at work.
      • kleinsch 5mo ago
        This hasn’t been true for 8+ years.
        • charcircuit 5mo ago
          Having both a personal and work Facebook account is against the rules and may lead to getting the account suspended.
      • Rekindle8090 5mo ago
        [flagged]
        • casualscience 5mo ago
          They absolutely do, wtf are you talking about. Also people use their work accounts and laptops to read their w2 and other sensitive info.
• fidotron 5mo ago
  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.
  • dist-epoch 5mo ago
    That people watch TikTok instead of Instagram reels. Quite embarrassing.
    • dylan604 5mo ago
      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.
• jtemplestein 5mo ago
  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?
  • evanjrowley 5mo ago
    It's the same approach as Windows Recall, but all data remains sovereign to the company generating it.
  • vorticalbox 5mo ago
    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 https://zed.dev/blog/acp-registry
• rvz 5mo ago
  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.
• dagmx 5mo ago
  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.
  • gwerbin 5mo ago
    That's not a bug, that's a feature
  • simmerup 5mo ago
    Yeah, if at any time Mark can ask Meta AI ‘which of my employees insulted me today’ for example, that’s wild
    • kridsdale1 5mo ago
      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.
      • gambiting 5mo ago
        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.
        • balamatom 5mo ago
          Huh. What do you reckon would have happened if you'd hired them anyway?
          • computably 5mo ago
• zingababba 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• camjw 5mo ago
  I guess this is why they acquired https://www.limitless.ai/ https://www.limitless.ai/ ?
• eddyg 5mo ago
  [dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47851242 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47851242 [dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47851086 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47851086
• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
• beloch 5mo ago
  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'.
  • le-mark 5mo ago
    > 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.
    • IAmBroom 5mo ago
      Which has also long been associated with inhumane labor practices, including slavery.
• storus 5mo ago
  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.
• Desafinado 5mo ago
  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?
  • alexpotato 5mo ago
    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.html 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??"
  • snek_case 5mo ago
    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.
    • kube-system 5mo ago
      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.
  • DanielHall 5mo ago
• Maufrais 5mo ago
  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.
• deadbabe 5mo ago
  From company metrics I have found that developers who make a lot of mouse movements correlate with weaker performance reviews. Something to think about.
• bossyTeacher 5mo ago
  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.
• hintymad 5mo ago
  Maybe this is exactly why Meta poached Alexandr Wang. Data capturing is an heirloom technique passed down from his Scale AI days
• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
• Avicebron 5mo ago
  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.
  • lazide 5mo ago
    Notably, I’ve had several lawyers sell me out. It’s not the emails, but the phone calls you need to worry about.
    • uejfiweun 5mo ago
      How do you mean? They violated attorney-client privelege?
    • leetrout 5mo ago
      Can add any detail to "sell you out"? Was it explicit violation of expected privacy of the conversation?
      • lazide 5mo ago
        Active conspiracy with opposing counsel to drag it out, avoid obvious resolutions, etc. Extremely common with divorce attorneys - and labor law.
        • gerdesj 5mo ago
          Do you have proof or at least some evidence?
          • to11mtm 5mo ago
            .... 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.
• gip 5mo ago
  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!
  • p_stuart82 5mo ago
    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.
  • Ifkaluva 5mo ago
    They have a lot of internal tools. My guess is that it’s to train the model to click around the internal tools
• smalltorch 5mo ago
  Gotta feed the beast some how.
• nemo44x 5mo ago
  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.
• colordrops 5mo ago
  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.
• lifeisstillgood 5mo ago
  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 …
• rubyfan 5mo ago
  Why do we allow this?
• shepherdjerred 5mo ago
  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.
• ulfw 5mo ago
  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
• pugio 5mo ago
  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.
  • hx8 5mo ago
    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.
• atleastoptimal 5mo ago
  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?
  • hx8 5mo ago
    Yes! That is exactly why they talk about "the permeant underclass" and hold onto their RSUs.
  • blitzar 5mo ago
    It is the case with most companies, that once you build something for them, you are out of a job.
  • ozgrakkurt 5mo ago
    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.
• dwaltrip 5mo ago
  Fucking insane. Optimizing ourselves to death. Capitalism is asleep at the wheel with its foot stuck on the gas pedal.
• redleader55 5mo ago
  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).
• phendrenad2 5mo ago
  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.
• starkeeper 5mo ago
  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.
• RobRivera 5mo ago
  I mean - uh - gotta find all the signals that may exist. I...admire the diligence
• negamax 5mo ago
  The irony of this is so strange..
• rkagerer 5mo ago
  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.
• lukeschlather 5mo ago
  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.
  • deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  • avaer 5mo ago
    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.
    • 2ndorderthought 5mo ago
      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.
      • kube-system 5mo ago
        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.
• larrytheworm 5mo ago
  [dead]
• vrganj 5mo ago
  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.
• dbgrman 5mo ago
  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.”
  • dbgrman 5mo ago
    “ 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.”
  • andrekandre 5mo ago
    > 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...
    • le-mark 5mo ago
      “Good” for their bottom line, not for the people.
  • reroute22 5mo ago
    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.
• vigneshwaraya 5mo ago
  this would be a good time for Meta employees to reconsider their life choices.
• ninjahawk1 5mo ago
  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.
  • CSSer 5mo ago
    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?
    • an0malous 5mo ago
      In this economy?
      • ninjahawk1 5mo ago
        Count dracula over here talking about the blood shortages
• vvpan 5mo ago
  Everybody will be a serf under technofeudalism.
  • frm88 5mo ago
    technofeudalism Technofascism. Fixed it.
• cm2012 5mo ago
  It will be funny when the AI learns to browse Reddit and watch porn during the work day.
• mandeepj 5mo ago
  Microsoft was also doing the same in their VIVA program.
  • ArcHound 5mo ago
    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?
• CarbonCycles 5mo ago
  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.
• shmerl 5mo ago
  1984 level sickening.
• motoboi 5mo ago
  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.
• jcims 5mo ago
  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 ...
• nektro 5mo ago
  how to cause a mass exodus with this one simple trick!
  • GuinansEyebrows 5mo ago
    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.
• stingrae 5mo ago
  If it is available for training, I assume it is available for discovery.
• tasoeur 5mo ago
  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…
• alex1138 5mo ago
  Zuck's a sociopath
• overgard 5mo ago
  At this rate they're not going to need to do layoffs.. nobody sane is going to want to work there.
• napolux 5mo ago
  fines are negligible for these companies, so i also expect these policies to be applied to eu employees without telling them
• bryanrasmussen 5mo ago
  Meta employees to start using AI to make fake mouse movements, keystrokes while goofing off.
• nafistiham 5mo ago
  With this data, meta can make metahumans which pass recaptcha for real.
• gordon_freeman 5mo ago
  If anyone still has not watched Severance, it is good time to start watching that show!
• ungreased0675 5mo ago
  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.
• LandenLove 5mo ago
  Next gen AI is going to become really proficient in scrolling Hacker News.
  • testfoobar 5mo ago
    Or high speed switching between a dozen workspaces across multiple monitors and 100s of chrome tabs.
  • djyde 5mo ago
    The first thing many people do after installing OpenClaw is summarize Hacker News
    • deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
    • djyde 5mo ago
      me too btw :P
• ok_dad 5mo ago
  Relevant story (Manna) https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
• ramon156 5mo ago
  What would be the wxact opposite of Meta as a company? Small, privacy focused, HN blacklisted at work? Am I missing something?
  • clapthewind 5mo ago
    Low pay, to be fair.
• vidarh 5mo ago
  So happy I decline to even start the Meta interview cycles. The company seemed ridiculous even back then, but this is next level.
• VerifiedReports 5mo ago
  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.
  • rkozik1989 5mo ago
    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.
    • VerifiedReports 5mo ago
      "will invest time into career paths that pay a lot but more reliably." What, pray tell, might those be?
• Uptrenda 5mo ago
  Time to leave tech forever and farm onions, I think.
• eqvinox 5mo ago
  I bet this doesn't include higher management. Wonder why.
  • eqvinox 5mo ago
    btw. There should be a word like dogfooding but for AI training. Dogtraining? Dogwalking? Dogfeeding?
    • tlibert 5mo ago
      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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_fighting
• vaylian 5mo ago
  Another alt link: https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-new-ai-tool-tracks-staff-activity-sparks-concern-2026-4 https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-new-ai-tool-tracks-staf...
• Markoff 5mo ago
  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.
• globular-toast 5mo ago
  The engineers who implement this should be ashamed of themselves.
• zer0zzz 5mo ago
  I definitely see a strong demand for a 11” 1kg macbook with these policies inevitably spreading.
• mbgerring 5mo ago
  UNIONIZE. If it’s not obvious to you now, it never will be.
  • Ridius 5mo ago
    Much harder to get the ball rolling on unionization when AI can monitor all chats/interactions for any mentioned of the topic
• blitzar 5mo ago
  "start" They 'trust me'. Dumb f*ks.
• gslin 5mo ago
  https://archive.is/TYcpI https://archive.is/TYcpI
• shevy-java 5mo ago
  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.
• eloisius 5mo ago
  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.
  • igleria 5mo ago
    > Yesterday I was doomscrolling computer vision related stuff on LinkedIn blink twice if you need help
  • gyomu 5mo ago
    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.
• type0 5mo ago
  Do they get each own Meta ray ban grasses as well that they have to wear at all time even in bathrooms?
• zelphirkalt 5mo ago
  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.
• zxc3 5mo ago
  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.
• aldielshala 5mo ago
  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.
• Xmd5a 5mo ago
  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".
  • DocTomoe 5mo ago
    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.
    • lofaszvanitt 5mo ago
      Just like chefs... a lot of lowlives lurk there too.
      • munchler 5mo ago
        Wut? How are chefs like waterboarders?
        • hnav 5mo ago
          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.
    • initatus 5mo ago
      That is the natural result. They're selecting for people that don't have that reaction, or those that can suppress it.
  • deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
• rldjbpin 5mo ago
  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.
• Jerem-6ix 5mo ago
  [dead]
• darepublic 5mo ago
  I assume meta is doing this to train use computer like capabilities
• sietsietnoac 5mo ago
  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!
• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
• _the_inflator 5mo ago
  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.
• sathish316 5mo ago
  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?
• Balgair 5mo ago
  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)
• stego-tech 5mo ago
  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.
• wg0 5mo ago
  Capitalist tech bros have lost their marbles at this point.
• timedude 5mo ago
  If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear? Right?
• chrisellwood 5mo ago
  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.
• madhacker 5mo ago
  Meta employees it's time to raid the kitchen and head for the exit ASAP. Maybe to team Flock
• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
• hluska 5mo ago
  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.
• mastermage 5mo ago
  Meta should go and pound sand.
• yalogin 5mo ago
  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.
• tpsvca 5mo ago
  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.
• starkeeper 5mo ago
  Normalizing this shit is more evil than anything too. Really classy overlords strikes again.
• zeruch 5mo ago
  This is....ridiculous. Does Meta also capture it's CEOs movements with such fidelity?
• datahack 5mo ago
  This should be made illegal as soon as possible. This is clearly and obviously the shortest possible path to a total surveillance society.
• akimbostrawman 5mo ago
  Can anybody else hear it? the world smallest violin.
• nopointttt 5mo ago
  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.