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Irony as Meta staff unhappy about running surveillance software on work PCs
- nsbk 6mo agoSurveillance for thee, not for me
- louiereederson 6mo agoSurveillance for all
- bell-cot 6mo agoThat would imply that Zuck is being surveilled.
- isodev 6mo agoHas anyone asked Palantir and their many subsidiaries and foundations what they have on Zuck?
- breppp 6mo agoHe is using a mobile phone, his location is sold by the mobile company and can be bought for relatively cheap
- GJim 6mo ago> his location is sold by the mobile company Citation please.
- breppp 6mo agoIt's as far away as a google search, but: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/08/t-mobile-claimed-selling-location-data-without-consent-is-legal-judges-disagree/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/08/t-mobile-claimed... https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/ice-cell-mobile-phone-data-sold-us-government-tracking-b2877497.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/ice-cell-m...
- Tangurena2 6mo agoThe first photo I ever saw of a person covering their laptops camera with tape was a publicity photo of Zuck. Everyone I personally knew in the intelligence-adjacent industry had already been doing it. He was the first "civilian" I saw who did it intentionally.
- jjgreen 6mo agoFull title prefixed "Magnificent"
- RugnirViking 6mo agoI really don't like the conflation of all meta staff with the strategy of the massive multinational corpo-monster that is meta itself. Its very easy to suggest that someone should leave their job on ideological grounds when its someone else you've never met. I don't work at meta, I work at a large non-tech company. I've been seeing it more and more these days. People do it for programmers as a whole too, or scientists. Concerns about job market layoffs due to ai dismissed with "Programmers surprised as leopards eat their own face" as though dave who does the database at your local high school is responsible in even some small sense for the effects of AI in society. There are actual people responsible for these problems. People who are not programmers. Who have far less in common with you or me than we both do with some random backend engineer at meta.
- dgellow 6mo agoDave working at meta is indeed in part responsible for meta doings. Yes leaving has a cost. That’s the whole point. Meta actions also have associated costs, it is just externalized and doesn’t impact Dave directly
- RugnirViking 6mo agoAs I said before. Its very easy to suggest that someone should leave their job on ideological grounds when its someone else you've never met. You have to understand, this hypothetical guy has never met zuck. He's quite possibly never met anyone who has never met zuck. He may well not live in america. The job market for programmers is not good right now. Estimates put average time in unemployment at 12+ months. Would you inflict this on your family? Because a different part of the giant company you work at did bad stuff? people you've never met, working on a product you've never worked on, did bad stuff? as opposed to all the other extremely moral giant companies you could be working for? This is, of course, oversimplified. Dave was probably laid off months ago anyway. Was he in some sense responsible for his own redundancy? I understand the feeling that we have to be able to pin some portion of blame or responsibility on companies. They are often able to launder responsibility through their sheer size, and their byzantine processes. But there are real people responsible for setting strategy! the people at the bottom do sometimes resign out of protest at immoral actions! but it has to be pretty naked to come to that. There are literally management strategy books about how to build departments to avoid workers realizing the purpose of their work so you can get them to do things they disagree with.
- poulpy123 6mo agoI don't see what can be trained with that, but it would be a nightmare to be always recorded like that
- derelicta 6mo agoProbably to detect all variations of dangerous words such as "union", "genocide" and "peace".
- vanviegen 6mo agoYou could use this to train an AI to behave like a Meta-employee. Meta seems to like the behavior of Meta-employees, or it wouldn't have hired so many. It would just prefer to have more of this behavior for less, so they'll try to use clankers instead of employees to produce the key strokes and mouse clicks.
- mingus88 6mo agoDo people honestly believe their current employers aren’t monitoring them right now? Every employment contract I’ve signed has included language that makes it clear that whatever I do on corporate time, on the corporate net, on corporate devices, is corporate property. This is why I never mix corp and personal data on my phone or join my phone to their WiFi. Is it just the AI training angle that makes this newsworthy?
- anal_reactor 6mo agoThe world of contracts is really interesting. Imagine a country Byteland that has a problem with alcoholism. Lots of people get too drunk and bother others. The parliament gathers and decides to issue a new law. First they try "it is illegal to bother other citizens in public" but the problem is, how do you legally define "to bother other citizens"? Then someone has a bright idea - make a law "it is illegal to be drunk in public". The idea is, only those who are annoying fucks will ever be checked, for obvious practical reasons. Everyone happy, the law passes. Citizens enjoy their beer, but they know that it they drink too much and start causing problems, they'll be arrested. One day a Sillycoin Valley startup comes up with great technology - a device that can pinpoint who exactly is drunk within two kilometers of range. Now suddenly lots of citizens who had just one beer and are minding their own business start getting fines. The point I'm making is, there is a difference between what contract explicitly says, and what is implicitly understood due to practical limitations of the real world we live in. When the real world changes so does the effective implementation of contracts, even though the contracts themselves don't change. The problem is, by the time the world has changed against your favor, you might not have the power to demand an adjustment to the already signed contract.
- joe_mamba 6mo agoMan, I sure wonder if those engineers building Palantir's, Flock's, and other surveillance SW right now (hello if you're reading this), will have this 20/20 hindsight "oh shit" epiphany moment, when the product they helped build is gonna be used against them or their kids in the future. Kind of like when Dr. Frankenstein finds his end at the hands of his creation. Those SW devs probably think that doing a deal with the devil in exchange for a higher than average income now, will allow them to build an upper class lifestyle where they'll be safe from the government's jackboots, but news flash, NO you won't, unless you're part of the insider-trading presidential Epstein Island elite pedo-class, you're also on the menu. Zuckerberg, Gates, Karp, Thiel, all have self sustaining doomsday bunkers on private islands, to escape the societal fallout of their actions. Do you?
- TacticalCoder 6mo ago> ... unless you're part of the insider-trading presidential Epstein Island elite pedo-class, you're also not safe from government overreach But how did that turn out for Ghislaine Maxwell though? We aren't seeing her much in the posh NYC parties anymore are we? And something also has to be said about public shame when sentences like: "Bill Gates got even more STDs than Windows got viruses and that lead to his wife quitting him". I'd rather be a small millionaire than a billionaire having to suffer headlines like that.
- joe_mamba 6mo agoBear in mind your examples are only those few who were stupid/unlucky enough to get exposed and caught, ending up as patsies to parrade to the public as fake "proof" that the system they pay taxes and answer to, somehow isn't corrupt to the core and working against them. Meanwhile other Epstein Island clients like Howard Lutnick are sitting next to the president right now(himself a client), and former client Bill Clinton used to be president, and their families amassed generational wealth, security and political influence that no mere mortal will ever be able to have no matter how hard they work. There's no justice here.
- sbarre 6mo agoGhislaine Maxwell is a woman. A fitting proxy for this whole situation, when you realize that she's the only person (so far) to have been put in jail over this whole "powerful men abusing women" situation.
- yfw 6mo agoRead Careless People. The fish rots from the head
- classified 6mo agoNone of those employees can claim ignorance as to who they work for. They made their bed, now they can lie in it.
- fhennig 6mo agoIn the actual article (not the headline) there is no mention of staff reporting to be unhappy.
- wzdd 6mo agoQuotes from unhappy staff are in the Business Insider article which the article links to in its third paragraph.
- fhennig 6mo agoAh I saw it now through another HN submission.
- thejokeisonme 6mo agoThe actual irony is that this very title is the ragebait, as they say in the article: > .. so it can keep them clicking on ragebait ..
- mykowebhn 6mo agos/Irony/Schadenfreude/g
- softwaredoug 6mo agoThis article is just a summary of other articles. Specifically these two more detailed ones: https://www.itnews.com.au/news/meta-to-start-capturing-employee-mouse-movements-keystrokes-625249 https://www.itnews.com.au/news/meta-to-start-capturing-emplo... 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...
- ramon156 6mo ago> "This makes me super uncomfortable. How do we opt out?" was the top-rated comment in response to the internal announcement, according to a post on Meta's internal workplace communications site seen by Business Insider." Have people lost their spine? seriously, quit your job. this is insane. why are americans putting up with this bullshit?
- figmert 6mo ago> Have people lost their spine? seriously, quit your job. this is insane. why are americans putting up with this bullshit? While I agree with you, sadly not everyone is in a position to just quit so easily, and even if the majority of the company quits, there are always people who are desperate enough to do the work and not complain.
- benbristow 6mo agoHave you seen the salaries Meta pay?
- embedding-shape 6mo agoThat's the crux. People aren't asking "Am I earning enough?" but "How can I earn more?", and it all spirals into whatever the current system could be called.
- jagged-chisel 6mo agoSo employees should have plenty in the bank to fall back on while they found their own companies to compete … right?
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- notTheLastMan 6mo agoFam, what should we actually do about this? If you want to be real for a minute, we all lived through the freedom of Covid WFH. We all did dishes and billed for it. We all told ourselves 'I needed a break, it helps me think about the problem'. (And that was true, one day I was stuck on an 8 queens problem and I ran a half marathon, when I finished I had the solution) But... common everyone... we are humans. We take the path of least resistance. Does anyone waste money or time on things that dont matter intentionally? If I'm making 200k a year with 0 output, I'll probably work on something else in the meantime. If I'm in office, I don't think I need surveillance, I'm on the clock and its my manager's job to supervise. WFH? I get it. This idea is as old as the panopticon, and Michel Foucault talks about this as well. As I get older and run my own company, I find my juniors and seniors need to be supervised. My mid-levels are fine. Juniors dont know when to ask for help. Seniors are complacent. Mid-levels seem to have something to prove. Can labor make a deal with management? I'll give you WFH for surveillance software.
- Macha 6mo ago> We all did dishes and billed for it. I don't think intellectual work is an always on hands on keyboard task. When in the office there's plenty of extended water cooler conversations or non work related conversations at work stations. Indeed I've often seen these cited as reasons for RTO.
- notTheLastMan 6mo agoThis is basically my case against RTO... I am a talker. I wont stop talking. I actually waste people's time talking philosophy.
- isodev 6mo ago> its my manager's job to supervise No it isn’t. The fault with your logic is that you assume people work because they’re supervised.
- 2ndorderthought 6mo agoIf I was hiring anyone for a job over 75k usd I should know very well that they can produce with very few touch points. I would also expect my team to speak up if someone wasn't producing. I wouldn't care about hours worked because they are a salary employee. I would care that the team could contact them and they contributed meaningfully to projects.
- villgax 6mo agogonna cry
- Devasta 6mo agoMeta employees shocked to find out they work for Meta.
- bossyTeacher 6mo agoNot unhappy enough to leave though.
- rubyfan 6mo agoThe Zuckerberg quote from the article reads like someone running for class president in high school. > helps you achieve your goals, create what you want to see in the world, experience any adventure, be a better friend to those you care about, and grow to become the person you aspire to be. … If you vote for me, all of your wildest dreams will come true. Thank you.
- boogieknite 6mo agovote for pedro
- throwaway2037 6mo agoI gotta say, the opening line is a gem of British humour: > Meta, the company built on watching everything its billions of users do online so it can keep them clicking on ragebait and targeted ads I am laughing so hard right now.
- everdrive 6mo agoAs much as everyone is rightly dunking on meta employees, it's an interesting slice of the population. Anyone who cared about surveillance and privacy (and addiction, and societal health, etc.) wouldn't be working for meta in the first place. The hypocrisy point is correct to point out, but I do wonder why this is a bridge too far for them.
- classified 6mo ago"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" -- Upton Sinclair
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- nikhilpareek13 6mo ago[flagged]
- dada78641 6mo agoI was once asked to install surveillance software on my personal PC, as a remote freelance worker. The person responsible on Slack told me "let me know when you've installed it". So I decided to just wait 15 minutes and then say "yeah I installed it" to see if they would notice that I didn't... and they didn't, they just said "OK, thanks" and I never heard anything about it ever again. I realize this doesn't really help this conversation but that's all I can think of whenever this kind of subject comes up.
- jimmydddd 6mo agoMakes sense. The dude probably didn't care about the software. He was just trying to check an item off of his task list for the day.
- Hamuko 6mo agoI've had the IT department complain that the phone monitoring software wasn't reporting back to them, gave me instructions to fix it, and when I told them that the instructions point to things that don't exist in the app, they never replied back to me. I presume that my work phone is still not pinging them.
- ChrisArchitect 6mo agoMore discussion on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47860961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47860961 And Related: Meta to start capturing employee mouse movements, keystrokes for AI training https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47851948 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47851948
- rich_sasha 6mo agoSo what happens when this keylogger captures the password that gives access to all the personal data Facebook scraped over the years?