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Meta employees protest against mouse tracking tech at US offices
- rexpop 5mo agoProud of them—it's scary to stand up to the boss, but we set the floor for eachother.
- iAMkenough 5mo agoThey should be supported, but they did choose to work for a boss whose entire career has followed the path of collecting sensitive personal data from people for personal gain.
- rexpop 5mo agoEverybody starts somewhere. They've taken maybe their first step in the right direction.
- TesterVetter 5mo ago[dead]
- blinkbat 5mo agohopefully they push back successfully. even if the most nefarious use is "we're training computer use AI", they should shell out for dedicated labs, not piggyback off the employees. gross. sidebar but I've never aspired to work for faang and as the years go on it seems more and more like the right choice. vampire culture.
- idle_zealot 5mo ago> they should shell out for dedicated labs Seriously. This goes for all kinds of analytics. We've normalized surveillance, and if you dare suggest opt-in analytics rather than forced or opt-out you get hit with "but then we won't get enough data to improve our product." That's your problem. Do a UX study, interview people, make a focused effort to make good software. That's how we got the best interface design of all time. Now we're drowning in data and our software is fucking garbage that constantly frustrates and confuses its users. Clearly the issue is not a lack of usage data. It may even do you some good to fly blind if this is your alternative. Really you should do the lab, though. Take this field seriously and cut out the live A/B testing.
- Bud 5mo ago[dead]
- entropyie 5mo agoStunning hypocrisy.
- getmoheb 5mo agoThe irony is indeed absolutely blinding
- rvz 5mo agoI see... The employees were all fine with tracking the entire globe and surveilling on Meta's family of apps, but when that is used against them by tracking their own mouse movements and their computers, it is now all too much? Why are you still at Meta then? Clearly Zuckerberg does not care and can easily (and will) lay them off. Just leave.
- AngryData 5mo agoWhy not protest the mouse tracking they do for the rest of the world? Oh wait because they only give a shit about themselves, that is why they still work for facebook.
- pesus 5mo agoThis is really a "hoisted by your own petard" situation. I hope they don't think people are going to be sympathetic towards them when they're guilty of doing the same type of things (and far worse) to billions of people.
- dangus 5mo agoI will never blame the non-management workers in this situation. Most of us are forced by modern society to work for someone else and there are a limited number of jobs available. Not everyone who works at Meta has a better, more ethical option. This woukd be like saying the person scanning your ticket at the concert condones Ticketmaster as a monopoly. No, they’re just trying to feed their family.
- FireBeyond 5mo ago> Not everyone who works at Meta has a better, more ethical option. Come on now. Software engineers at Meta are not trapped with Meta on their resume (whatever you may think of the company itself). Most of the FAANG, for engineering, just having that name on your resume, opens up doors. You might get less than $700K TC as an E6 but that's also not "trapped" unless you've chosen to outspend your income.
- siren2026 5mo agoExactly. Working at Meta means you studied for 4 weeks for the leetcode interviews. That type of dedication means you could very easily get any job anywhere else. And please don't compare someone making 800k$ with someone scanning a ticket for Ticketmaster.
- FireBeyond 5mo agoHow am I doing that? I'm talking about people who have very valid options elsewhere. "I'm stuck at Meta, making $800K, I have no other options". We're talking about software engineers who created much of the things they're complaining about. I'm not talking about say, cafeteria or custodial staff. And I despise Meta, and you can say whatever you want about Leetcode (and I tend to agree) but don't pretend that there are many many rungs of "software engineering calibers" in jobs that wouldn't see Meta, or Netflix and say "we have to interview this person".
- ai-x 5mo ago[flagged]
- dangus 5mo agoBootlicker mentality. They should unionize. Then, replacing the individual employees doesn’t work. (Much easier said than done of course)
- ai-x 5mo ago[flagged]
- nukedindia 5mo ago[dead]
- georgeburdell 5mo agoThe 5 Americans left at Meta have had enough
- bdhe 5mo agoWhat does this mean? I thought Meta has something like 80,000 employees. Meta had about 1,400 H-1B employee petitions last year. Even if we assume that number held for Meta's entire existence, that's less than 25,000 H-1B employees. Less than a third of Meta are presumably immigrants. Have I got something wrong or is there this belief that Meta doesn't hire any Americans?
- georgeburdell 5mo agoI don’t know why you think Meta accumulated most of its Chinese engineers through H1B. It’s top tier pay so most people move up to them from elsewhere.
- ironman1478 5mo agoPeople here are making some warranted snarky comments. I ended working at Meta for a few quarters and quit. I will say many employees are so abstracted away that you sort of forget that you work for Facebook to some extent. I also noticed that people really believe that what Facebook works on is a net good. I don't agree and maybe we don't agree, but saying "haha now it's happening to you" isn't the gotcha you think it is to those people if those people believe the products are a net good. I disagree that the products are a net good, to be clear. But working there lots of people drink the koolaid
- FireBeyond 5mo agoYup. I worked for Flock for a bit. During recruitment and onboarding, it was all big on ethics and morality and slippery slopes and responsible data stewardship. After HR pats you on the back and you met with your team and org? Mask off. "No, we won't build controls that allow us to block [data sharing that is illegal for agencies in state] for those agencies. That's not our concern. Oh, they want training on how to do that data sharing? Sure." Garrett would talk regularly at all hands about a very Minority Report-esque future that was driven and made possible by Flock, and he was very clear it wasn't exaggerated for example or aspirational but an organizational goal. Anyone who stayed there more than a few months knows exactly what they're doing.
- s5300 5mo ago[dead]
- whyenot 5mo agoLike most state employees, I am in a union and while there are MANY things I do not like about my union, from its high dues, to its constant forays into politics, to the supine pose it takes to contract negotiations, there is one thing that it does very well, and that is stands up against BS like this in a very meaningful way. Tech workers need a union or some union-like organization that stands up for basic worker rights.
- archagon 5mo agoForays into politics? Isn’t a union inherently political?
- chrismcb 5mo agoIt shouldn't be. Of course I think sometimes it has to be. But it is supposed to represent the employees in a collective bargaining agreement. That is it. You could argue they should be involved with some politics around labor laws.
- jplusequalt 5mo agoThis is all literally politics. The reason you'd need to form a collective bargaining agreement comes down to politics surrounding labor laws. Hell, your ability to form unions in the first place comes down to rights granted to you by the government.
- Avicebron 5mo agoCan you see that spending money on charities vs spending that money on collective bargaining could be both under the category of "politics" but not equivalent in their form of "political action"?
- jplusequalt 5mo agoThe point is that if you talk about unionization, you're talking about politics, because unions don't exist in countries where the politicians made them illegal.
- greenchair 5mo agoBut these protesting employees were perfectly fine with mouse tracking their users for adtech purposes?
- HDBaseT 5mo agoRules for thee but not for me. This sentiment continues endlessly up the chain. Ultimately, deploying endless adtech, surveillance and data scraping techniques puts you only one or two steps away from a Palantir employee.
- TitaRusell 5mo agoAmerican work culture is so damn toxic. If you hire someone you trust them. Otherwise don't. I fail to see how treating everyone like a miserable inmate at a Siberian gulag is going to help innovation.
- yodsanklai 5mo agoI don't think it's about trust, but they're using employees behavior for training their replacement.
- jcgrillo 5mo agoIt's hilariously fucked up. They pay us O($1M)/yr and treat us like we're working on an assembly line producing Jira story points. And if they don't surveil us carefully enough we might steal a point from them! Or something? Who knows. It's not just Facebook, although what they're doing here is particularly bad, but this ethos permeates the entire American tech industry. With very few exceptions, it's like this at every company.
- booleandilemma 5mo agoOh poor Meta employees! So sad! If they were serious they would just walk out. They don't like the mouse tracking tech but I'll bet they like that sweet salary and cushy office job. How are the lunch options? I bet they're great. Oh what's that? You work from home? Must be nice.
- blinkbat 5mo agoyour objection to them isn't that they work for a -- i think we can all agree -- pretty much despised and evil institution, but that their lives are too good? pick the right battle here.
- nalekberov 5mo agoWhen such technologies are used to track masses, Meta employees just shrug, when it’s used to track them, it’s unacceptable. “The ox does not mind the yoke until it is on his own neck.”
- JohnMakin 5mo ago[flagged]
- jacques_chester 5mo agoI work at Meta (though after next Wednesday, maybe not). I signed the petition. Am I hypocrite? I think another version of me would think so. I signed up because nobody else would take me on by the time they offered me something. After having only 3 months of work out of 18 months, with savings depleted to zero, facing the prospect of losing health coverage and having to fall back on family, I took the deal. Hate me if you like. But I have a 40-odd year head start on hating me, so I doubt you'll make any kind of dent. ------ In any case, pushing back, anyhow, anywhere, is better than nothing. Let's not get stuck in HN's favorite argumentative shortcut, the Nirvana Fallacy.
- jemmyw 5mo agoI'm very surprised that fb took you on but nobody else would. Why do you think that was?
- jacques_chester 5mo agoHard to say, lots of things I guess. One was that I was never good at the current interview triad and needed to practice it a lot. Another was my resume, not impressive to a certain kind of hiring manager and recruiter. Still another was that I asked blasphemous questions like "will I get to sleep?" and voiced controversial views like "teams focused on quality move faster". The thing is that you sometimes get quite daft reasons back. One place said "you gave more examples from Pivotal than Shopify". Well yes, I was at Pivotal about thrice as long, that's how time works. I just let it slide.
- mitaphane 5mo agoHey Meta Employees, Instead of signing petitions to enact change, which obviously won't happen because you're under a dictatorship, erode the company from the inside out. Your platforms are already enshittified, enshittify your workplace, make a game out of making your workplace America's #1 toxic workspace. Quiet Quit, Gaslight your superiors, have AI write all your code & workplace communications, hit accept on all, while sludging up communications & the codebase. Make everything harder to do work while claiming all the productivity gains. You'll be doing humanity a service. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Sabotage_Field_Manual https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Sabotage_Field_Manual
- jacques_chester 5mo agoManagement is waaaayyy ahead of you on all of those suggestions.
- TheChaplain 5mo agolol first I thought Meta had a rodent problem :) Anyways, there is a ton of mouse wigglers out there, notably on aliexpress.com, many external and not connected to your workstation.
- rsynnott 5mo agoFairly strong "never thought the leopard would eat MY face" energy there. "Argh, the surveillance company I work for is surveilling me!"