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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 expect
by dagmx 6mo 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 6mo agoThat's not a bug, that's a feature
- simmerup 6mo agoYeah, if at any time Mark can ask Meta AI ‘which of my employees insulted me today’ for example, that’s wild
- kridsdale1 6mo agoI 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 6mo agoIn 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 6mo agoHuh. What do you reckon would have happened if you'd hired them anyway?
- computably 6mo agoWhat? 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.
- jjmarr 6mo agoManagers 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.
- gambiting 6mo ago>>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.
- jjmarr 6mo agoI 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/#:~:text=The%20Plaintiff%20had,with%20no%20issues. https://mathewsdinsdale.com/employers-advisor-march-2025/#:~...
- balamatom 6mo agoI meant what would have happened - and to whom - if HR had greenlighted the offer, but others' posts pretty much clarified that for me, thanks.
- mancerayder 6mo agoWhat is the blacklist and is it company-specific? I'd be more concerned about industry-wide blacklisting.
- gambiting 6mo agoNo 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.
- LightBug1 6mo agoShould have framed it. Good job.
- simmerup 6mo agoUntil 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
- shermantanktop 6mo agoThat’d be a snub to cherish.
- seanp2k2 6mo agoAs if you would ever be afforded an audience in the first place.
- simmerup 6mo agoTrue, was thinking while writing that that was the most unlikely thing in the story which is wild
- BeetleB 6mo ago> 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?
- OkayPhysicist 6mo agoThey can't legally mandate an exit interview, but they sure can pay you for one.
- seanp2k2 6mo agoPossibly 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-employees/ https://fortune.com/2025/03/27/meta-block-list-hiring-employ... https://www.businessinsider.com/how-block-lists-affect-your-job-search-and-career-advancement-2025-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/how-block-lists-affect-your-... https://medium.com/@ossiana.tepfenhart/the-no-hire-list-is-real-and-this-might-be-why-youre-not-hired-ca5113218f05 https://medium.com/@ossiana.tepfenhart/the-no-hire-list-is-r... https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/16/silicon-valley-internal-work-spying-surveillance-leakers https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/16/silicon-v...
- zeroonetwothree 6mo agoNothing 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.
- storus 6mo agoNarcissists often want to get the ones that ran away back to properly destroy them.
- zepppotemkin 6mo agoHe's already got the willing-intern-finder.md skill locked and loaded
- kube-system 6mo agoAll enterprise messaging apps support exporting your DMs today, for legal compliance.
- everdrive 6mo agoYes, but I cannot imagine Meta cares about chilling their employees. They're deep into the "extract more value" phase and are no longer bringing in the cutting edge talent.
- stringfood 6mo agoat 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
- renegade-otter 6mo agoRight, 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.
- PradeetPatel 6mo agoTbh 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.
- Hamuko 6mo ago>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?
- downrightmike 6mo ago"Unless I suggest it and then he will throw hands against anyone who is against me"
- piker 6mo ago> A handful of engineers were let go as the result of a re-alignment, and their AI counterparts are actively maintaining their code. Feel like I'm reading a Gibson novel here.
- lazide 6mo agoHint: it’s also fiction
- PradeetPatel 6mo agoI wish. Check out colleagues.ai as the Chinese equivalent of the programme.
- lazide 6mo agoIf that actually replaces your coworker, I feel sorry for everyone.
- layman51 6mo agoQuestion: 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?
- plagiarist 6mo agoWould require a government willing to hold criminals accountable even after taking bribery into account.
- blharr 6mo agoAny 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.
- BeetleB 6mo ago> 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.
- Miraste 6mo agoWhile 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.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- Miraste 6mo agoUnion 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.
- whateverboat 6mo ago1. 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.
- b65e8bee43c2ed0 6mo agoif you use your work machine at Facebook for dissent, you don't deserve a tech-adjacent job.
- reaperducer 6mo agoIn most developed countries, dissent in the workplace is protected by labor laws.
- nacozarina 6mo agohe’s trying to prove he can lick boots even harder
- pocksuppet 6mo agoIn most developed countries, the workplace punishes it anyway, because they can and it's hard to get the law enforced.
- mulmen 6mo agoIt'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.
- reaperducer 6mo agoIt'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).
- anonymousDan 6mo agoIt 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.
- mulmen 6mo agoWhat 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.
- mulmen 6mo agoIt 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.
- sassymuffinz 6mo agoHighly ironic that people who spend their lives building things that invade everyone else's privacy might now whinge about privacy themselves.
- Blackthorn 6mo agoCouldn't have happened to a more deserving group of people. My irony detector is sparking so badly I think it's about to blow.
- bsilvereagle 6mo agoThere 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.
- dlev_pika 6mo agoI guess Palantir is cool as long as they keep the queer interest group going
- Teever 6mo agoLike 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.
- resident423 6mo agoThere 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-fortune-deluge-fraudulent-ads-documents-show-2025-11-06/ https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...
- gdhkgdhkvff 6mo agoThis 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.
- engineer_22 6mo agoI 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....
- bagels 6mo agoThere was a lot of open dissent on workplace from what I recall.
- JuniperMesos 6mo agoI already assume that on a work computer everything I'm doing could be monitored by work IT. At every job I've had, I've made a point of not using work hardware for anything I even remotely thought someone at the job might object to. Instead I use my own hardware for that kind of thing - I own a smartphone, I own multiple computers, this is not hard to do. When I worked at a startup that had some internal conflict between the software engineers and management, someone made a Signal group to chat about the issues among the software engineers privately and everyone joined that group with their own Signal accounts, without any kind of issue.
- catcowcostume 6mo ago> Yes they could have accessed logs before but there’s a difference between directed checking after incidents and active surveillance at scale.
- JuniperMesos 6mo agoNot really from the perspective of my own risk/reward calculation. I don't know in advance what's going to be considered an "incident" that will make corporate IT suddenly want to search my work computer. Better to simply have a policy of never using a computer my work controls for personal data, especially when I already have my own computers for that that I use regardless of what job I happen to be working at.
- johntash 6mo agoKeep 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.
- eska 6mo agoThis may be legally challenging if you’re not allowed to communicate company internal information and especially files outside of company hardware.
- 6mo ago
- resident423 6mo agoMeta employees are not typically known for their deep concerns about privacy.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- reroute22 6mo agoDon'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.
- duskdozer 6mo agoIt's also much less of an undertaking to move companies than move countries
- shimman 6mo agoOh 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.
- reroute22 6mo agoExecs 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.
- boombapoom 6mo agounless if everyone comes together to poison the data set
- samiv 6mo agoHere's a wild idea..how about you know just talk?
- romanovcode 6mo ago> 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.
- ModernMech 6mo agoI'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.
- mizzao 6mo agoAh, fantastic, gives off Aperture Science (from Half-life 2) vibes!
- weezing 6mo agoImagine discussing anything non-work related through company channels. Why would you do that?
- ButlerianJihad 6mo agoI 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.
- shoulderfake 6mo ago[dead]