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

reuters.com

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

#121

Post by mgiampapa »

darth_avocado wrote: post #58
jmull wrote: post #26

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!!”

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.

Many many moons ago I refused to implement a calendar event scraping system at Meta where it would look at all of your meetings on the calendar and do "analysis". IDK what ever happened to that task, I assume it died a death of no one else being willing to do it. This was probably 2011 or so, I can only imagine it has gotten so much worse.

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

#122

Post by AgentOrange1234 »

satvikpendem wrote: post #102
jaapz wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There shouldn't be any expectation of privacy? There absolutely should!

On a work computer? No there shouldn't and isn't.

That sounds like a truly dystopian take to me, but suppose you're right and nobody should ever use their work computer for anything personal.

Per TFA, this thing is literally taking screenshots of what is on the employee's screen. At work my screen sometimes had things such as: performance data on other employees, my own PII from HR systems, PII from customers, password managers, etc. It's also logging keystrokes. How many times do you type passwords a day.

Collecting that kind of information on purpose is truly wild. Imagine the security safeguards you would need just to prevent it from leaking. Wait what, they're explicitly collecting it to train LLMs with it? God help us all.

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

#123

Post by Miraste »

[deleted] wrote: post #109
Miraste wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While 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]

Union 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.

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

#124

Post by nickvec »

PradeetPatel wrote: post #83
dagmx wrote: post #42

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.

Tbh 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 wo…

Just speculating, but the intention wasn't reducing key personnel risk. It was so that your employer could fire them and replace them with an agent running off of their associated skills.md.

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

#125

Post by wavefunction »

BeetleB wrote: post #96
dagmx wrote: post #42

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.

> 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…

>Why do people expect to have a right to do non-work related stuff on the job?

Like use the restroom? Personally, I'm not a slave. I am getting more and more used to the idea of having to push back on those who do exhibit such a mentality. Y'all are beginning to become a threat to the rest of us.

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

#126

Post by futuraperdita »

PradeetPatel wrote: post #83
dagmx wrote: post #42

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.

Tbh 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 wo…

> A handful of engineers were let go as the result of a re-alignment, and their AI counterparts are actively maintaining their code.

I know you’re in India, but in the US, could this not be considered intellectual property theft on “right of publicity”? Your persona and working style is one of your core values you bring to market; building a simulacrum of that is not something I expect to be part of the “your output is the company’s IP” in an existing contract.

I will give a company the right to try to reproduce my output. But my very likeness and modus operandi? No.

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

#127

Post by reaperducer »

PradeetPatel wrote: post #83
dagmx wrote: post #42

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.

Tbh 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 wo…

Tbh that's to be expected, the work machine is the company's property and there shouldn't be any expectation of privacy.

There remains a thing called human dignity.

If a company can't trust the people it hires, that's a fault in the hiring process, not the employees.

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

#128

Post by rexpop »

satvikpendem wrote: post #102
jaapz wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There shouldn't be any expectation of privacy? There absolutely should!

On a work computer? No there shouldn't and isn't.

I spend the majority of my adult life working, and you're telling me I should spend it surveilled?

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

#129

Post by overfeed »

BeetleB wrote: post #96
dagmx wrote: post #42

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.

> 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…

This comments pairs really well with the song Sixteen Tons - I cued the song[1] and re-read your comment.

More substantively: I would like the employer/employee transaction to be one of buing/selling labor. To me, training AI on keystrokes nudges the deal towards selling one's "soul" next to other dystopian tropes like brain implants and work toilets that analyze excretions.

You are correct that employers own the laptops and can install anything they want, which is why I never do anything other than work there - the farthest I will go is participate in employer-hosted shitpost groups/channels, which are not anonymous, and they are free to train their models on that.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1980WfKC0o

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

#130

Post by satvikpendem »

euroderf wrote: post #99
PradeetPatel wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tbh 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 wo…

> the work machine is the company's property and there shouldn't be any expectation of privacy. A bogus argument, methinks. Consider that the company also owns the phones, but can or do they listen to every phone call ?

If it's a work phone, yes they can.
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