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Meta to start capturing employee mouse movements, keystrokes for AI training
511–520 of 561 posts
Re: Meta to start capturing employee mouse movements, keystrokes for AI training
#512Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know right, so much pain and horror has been unleashed in the world by Meta… I have zero sympathy for their employees. Someone should’ve said no to developing this tech in the first place but here we are.
Former meta employee. It's not like people have an unlimited number of places to work, even if they have Meta on their resume. Many of my colleagues (and myself included) had struggled in the job market in the past before landing at Meta. If it's work for Meta, or suffer more tumult in the hiring market; it's easy to understand why many might decide to take the offer even with the moral implications. I used to bring…
> It's very western of us to always be tracking the conseqentiality of our actions even when we're just the cog in a wheel
An awful lot of Eastern philosophy would disagree with you.
Re: Meta to start capturing employee mouse movements, keystrokes for AI training
#513Earlier quoted context omitted.
As much as it's funny to dunk on meta this type of surveillance is becoming the norm. Failed start ups are selling all their emails, chats, commits, etc for companies to train on. Most job offers now come with statements about how you don't have right to your likeness, or your personal network I think most people assume that's for photo ops, but ... Yea. I expect more and more of this. products and product features r…
Already 10 years ago, I got an email from a webshop I used to use once , informing me they were closing down. They'd happily sell the customer database to me, if I were interested. Mind you, they were so desperate that they made this offer to all their customers . Its anecdotal, and only tangentially related. But my point is, companies blatantly selling your data isn't exactly a new thing, and not really AI related e…
This goes back to 1995 when I was just finishing up grade twelve but it left quite the taste in my mouth. The web industry was just starting to kick off in 1995 and people were opening up web design firms. At the time, young people had part time jobs and while my attempts to pump gas had all ended in rejection, I managed to get a job doing ‘web design’ which at the time meant typing things like and hundreds of times a page.
There were issues. One of the biggest was that it was 1994-1995, I lived in Regina and that city was not an early adopter. But the guy who ran the company had us doing all kinds of stuff for him.
Then he ran out of money. Since he couldn’t pay his staff he tried to sell his almost non existent client list to a competitor. I got a little lost on the details because they didn’t really make sense but apparently I was supposed to work for free for six months so he could sell his client list and then pay me.
I was 17 and really badly wanted to buy a Pentium processor before I started university so I was tempted but my parents had to explain that that was the single dumbest thing they had ever heard. I didn’t get a Pentium processor until 1997 because of that dude and I’m still a little bitter.
Moral is, buy the client list so the nerds can get to 90mhz. :)
Re: Meta to start capturing employee mouse movements, keystrokes for AI training
#514Earlier quoted context omitted.
Meta employees are not typically known for their deep concerns about privacy.
Don'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.
Oh 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.
Re: Meta to start capturing employee mouse movements, keystrokes for AI training
#515Earlier quoted context omitted.
This 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.
> This is the exact type of thing that software IC’s should reject in solidarity. Yes. Which includes quitting, en masse, from any company that does this. Meta ought to find it impossible to employ anyone with a policy like this.
This shit's why the industry should have unionized when times were good.
It's not just for pay, it's for pushing back on inhumane horse crap.
Re: Meta to start capturing employee mouse movements, keystrokes for AI training
#516This is one of those interesting “I wonder why” moments in tech. And I’m sure that in five years, this event will be an early symptom of something that will happen.
A cynic would say this has nothing to do with AI since meta owns employee machines anyways and has always been collecting data. Perhaps voluntary attrition > layoffs thinking in action.
But I’m having a lot of trouble envisioning how my keystrokes could actually train something you could use while you’re typing. Latency between keystrokes and seeing things appear would kill my productivity way more than a tool could recapture. Heck, when VS Code fell in love with agent suggestions it took me a week to fix my editor so I could be productive again.
Re: Meta to start capturing employee mouse movements, keystrokes for AI training
#517>data collected would not be used for performance assessments or any other purpose besides model training And you expect Meta employees , of all people, to believe this?
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Re: Meta to start capturing employee mouse movements, keystrokes for AI training
#518Meta should go and pound sand.
Re: Meta to start capturing employee mouse movements, keystrokes for AI training
#519Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know right, so much pain and horror has been unleashed in the world by Meta… I have zero sympathy for their employees. Someone should’ve said no to developing this tech in the first place but here we are.
Former meta employee. It's not like people have an unlimited number of places to work, even if they have Meta on their resume. Many of my colleagues (and myself included) had struggled in the job market in the past before landing at Meta. If it's work for Meta, or suffer more tumult in the hiring market; it's easy to understand why many might decide to take the offer even with the moral implications. I used to bring…
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon him not understanding it
Re: Meta to start capturing employee mouse movements, keystrokes for AI training
#520Earlier quoted context omitted.
Former meta employee. It's not like people have an unlimited number of places to work, even if they have Meta on their resume. Many of my colleagues (and myself included) had struggled in the job market in the past before landing at Meta. If it's work for Meta, or suffer more tumult in the hiring market; it's easy to understand why many might decide to take the offer even with the moral implications. I used to bring…
What Meta does (and here I want to be clear that you can replace Meta with Apple, Microsoft, Google, Palantir...) is eventually public knowledge, profusely discussed even on HN. This means substantial amount of people have been aware, for decades. And even if "just quit" is not an option - why not push for policy to regulate these corps? Why is it that after all this time, these same corps now also own at least 1 bra…
> And when the EU/Australia/China.. tries to regulate punish those corps, suddenly everyone comes out on HN to explain protectionism, overreach, some -ism, and "actually we need to give them the benefit of the doubt" etc... why not support that momentum?
I really, really want to believe it's bot warfare. But there is this running theme of HN posters who think because something is _legal_, or because you can point at it historically and go "acktually it's always been like this", it's therefore _moral_ and we should not ever push back on the excesses of these awful fucking companies.