Meta is tracking its employees' every mouse click — and they're mad
by Séamus Bellamy · Boing BoingIt's been a while since I had a good belly laugh: employees at Meta are having the vapors over the fact that their keystrokes and mouse movements are being monitored by the company. Imagine, having your every move recorded! How fast you type or what else you look at on your laptop being monitored! My god, one could almost believe that Meta's management is listening in on the company's employees even when they aren't actually using any of Meta's software or tools. How invasive!
According to Wired, last month Meta began installing mandatory software called the Model Capability Initiative on US employees' laptops. The tool records screens when using certain apps, collecting "real examples of how people actually use" computers, including mouse movements, button clicks, and dropdown navigation, per Reuters. The program sparked a petition demanding its end, which circulated to nearly 20,000 coworkers.
One engineer writing in an internal forum said they were "mixed on AI" and nervous about "what kind of norms are we establishing about how the technology is used." They also wrote:
"Selfishly, I don't want my screen scraped because it feels like an invasion of my privacy. But zooming out, I don't want to live in a world where humans — employees or otherwise — are exploited for their training data."
A gaggle of programmers, engineers and marketing hacks who work for a company that relies on reaping as much user data as possible to throw disturbingly targeted ads at them are complaining about being watched while they work? Are you shitting me? Apparently, a sense of self-awareness isn't a prerequisite for receiving a paycheck from Mark Zuckerberg. I don't recall a bunch of moaning by Meta's minions when the company's hate speech policy was changed to make the online lives of minorities a digital hell. Everyone working for Meta, be it for WhatsApp, Instagram or Facebook, knows damn well what the company they work for does and how they do it.
Cry me an ironic river.
Previously: