Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min • Hacker News Board

Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min

#361

Post by zeroonetwothree » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 4:25 PM UTC

jbuhbjlnjbn wrote: post #194

schnitzelstoat wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, many companies don't want the liability issues. Like what happens if I open my bank account on my work computer? You could argue I can expect someone to be watching but I have no warning that someone is? Here in the EU that would probably be an easy lawsuit.

How do you expect an employee to prove their banking actions on the company computer were spied on? I imagine this impossible to prove.

In discovery you can ask for the records. Of course you would need some initial evidence to show it’s likely it exists.

Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min

#362

Post by rzz3 » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 4:26 PM UTC

crispyambulance wrote: post #20

It's always been hard to know the extent of how draconian tracking actually is (IT pros tend to not talk about it much). In the US, there's the expectation that when you use an employer-provided device that any and all activity on it can be fully monitored/recorded and used against the employee for any reason. In practice, however, few people worry about reasonable amounts web-surfing, being on hacker-news or doing l…

In so far as bracing for draconian tracking, I already would have never worked for Meta and especially wouldn’t now. I think we can vote with our feet and not work for companies that do this.

Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min

#363

Post by esikich » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 4:27 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #350

ryandrake wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always, throughout a 25+ year career, kept personal business on personal devices and work business on work devices, and never cross the streams. Oddly, this is really controversial on HN, though! I've gotten so many weirdly angry responses when suggesting people try it, like it's a huge inconvenience to just bring a personal phone to work in order to do your banking and fuck around posting on HN. It's so much ea…

I fully agree with you. I think large majority on HN works in cool startups without IT rules that could even cost their job when failing security assessments. Another one, there is no cowboy instalation of dependencies, the CI/CD servers can only talk to internal nexus, jfrog,...

Yeah, that's pretty clear. There's a comment saying that just managing PCs is risky. I don't think most people here understand how 1000s of devices are managed in larger companies and the damage an average non technical user is capable of if just left to their own devices.

Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min

#364

Post by mrguyorama » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 4:30 PM UTC

vanuatu wrote: post #220

yojo wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meta is straight evil. It undermines the institutions of democracy and it negatively impacts its users mental health, all in service of selling your data to advertisers so they can better goad unnecessary consumption. If I learn you work at Meta, I will judge you as at best lacking a moral compass and treat you appropriately. Apple has problems, but is a lot closer to morally neutral. Ditto for Netflix. Amazon has ho…

not to defend zuck but its a common misconception that meta sells data advertisers dont see the personal data they buy for ad placement

Why should anyone at all care about this distinction?

Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min

#365

Post by zeroonetwothree » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 4:32 PM UTC

siren2026 wrote: post #348

rootusrootus wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, health care is primary. I see a lot of people on the FIRE forums who are young and haven’t really looked into what insurance can cost in the years leading up to Medicare eligibility age. It’s the best argument for working until close up 60. Personally, I’ve focused on finding a place I enjoy being, rather than optimizing for income and planning to retire ASAP.

Why does everyone absolutely need insurance? Nowadays insurance costs upto 5000$/month with high deductibles and plenty of bureaucracy and paperwork. I have decided to not get any insurance and negociate directly with healthcare provider (They almost all give you huge discount if you pay cash so they don't have to deal with the insurance backdoor deals). If you FIRE anyways, you should really consider medical tourism…

I’m with you but my partner doesn’t really agree so here I am paying the $40k/yr.

Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min

#366

Post by drstewart » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 4:33 PM UTC

new_account_104 wrote: post #74

xnorswap wrote: post #44

I hate it when companies use this kind of trick to get around legislation or privacy concerns. "Employees are able to turn off tracking". Sure, but there is a power imbalance, and employees will come to understand ( although never stated in any handbook ) that the rate at which they disable it will be taken into account in performance reviews. Just like "unlimited PTO" is not a benefit, because employees self-regulat…

[flagged]

Ah, hyperbole. You must be from Reddit.

Since Meta workers are slaves, no one can blame them for their work or employer though, as you no doubt agree.

Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min

#367

Post by fnordpiglet » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 4:33 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #292

crispyambulance wrote: post #20

It's always been hard to know the extent of how draconian tracking actually is (IT pros tend to not talk about it much). In the US, there's the expectation that when you use an employer-provided device that any and all activity on it can be fully monitored/recorded and used against the employee for any reason. In practice, however, few people worry about reasonable amounts web-surfing, being on hacker-news or doing l…

I've always, throughout a 25+ year career, kept personal business on personal devices and work business on work devices, and never cross the streams. Oddly, this is really controversial on HN, though! I've gotten so many weirdly angry responses when suggesting people try it, like it's a huge inconvenience to just bring a personal phone to work in order to do your banking and fuck around posting on HN. It's so much ea…

I’d note that my concern with Meta tracking my keystrokes isn’t that I’m mixing work with personal but that Meta is an intensely metrics driven culture with KPI optimization fixation (iRev is the heart of all their decisions, even at the cost of doing things that are clearly wrong, likely illegal, or immoral). The place is a pressure cooker of performance management and while this data likely is used for model training, there’s zero chance it’s not also going to be used to measure your relative performance and determine when to fire you because you aren’t conformant enough with whatever bizarrely poorly thought out metrics some VP pushed some director pushed some M2 to conceive of then everyone nods and signs off on as long as they can wave a data scientist at it to say “statsig,” with the ultimate goal of producing a classifier that can automate the process of end to end reviews (how do you really do a 50:1 IC:Manager ratio without performance review automation?)

They’ve already structured the model to be a binary classifier - every six months they’re going to let go 10% for performance, and they are flattening the performance range in the upside to show no signal. They billed this as a great thing for ICs because they won’t have to compete for classification and there’s no bubble zone of impeding doom, but they gloss over the top grading range went from 10->15% per year (in 2025) to 21% (as the 10 percent twice a year compounds) performance cuts, and they try to hide the fact LLMs will be doing the reviews for managers (not to mention a 50:1 IC to manager compression implies letting go 80% of managers - so the managers are now in full on squid game mode using ICs as meat shields).

So I think the “will they see my personal stuff” is not at all what is going on inside the mind of meta employees. It’s the fact they’re being fed into a stochastic parrot wood chipper.

Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min

#368

Post by zeroonetwothree » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 4:34 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #335

dyauspitr wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been searching. I can’t find anything else that pays even remotely close to tech. It’s a sea of $40-60k jobs with a lot of work at the ground level.

Every CxO on the planet is foaming at the mouth now, because they see AI as the way they can finally cast tech into that sea of $40-60k jobs. I knew a (jerk) founder who would openly grumble about how expensive tech talent was and how "one day, when tech cools off, you guys are going all to be paid like the guys on the manufacturing floor..." Typically they're not so mask-off but I bet a lot of them think like that.

If anything AI is going to get rid of the lower tier tech jobs. There will be much fewer but they will pay 7 figs. Basically you replace 10 devs with one super dev and a fleet of agents.

At least that’s what the CEOs seem to expect.

Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min

#369

Post by wegwerper » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 4:36 PM UTC

Simple solution: unionize! The rest of the world has figured this out. Union tarrifs don't need to dictate salary bands, often they don't. More often they regulate time off, sick pay, that there are processes in place, and that you have escalation paths to negotiate on your behalf on things like this.

The best part? Strikes work!

Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min

#370

Post by egorfine » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 4:37 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #292

crispyambulance wrote: post #20

It's always been hard to know the extent of how draconian tracking actually is (IT pros tend to not talk about it much). In the US, there's the expectation that when you use an employer-provided device that any and all activity on it can be fully monitored/recorded and used against the employee for any reason. In practice, however, few people worry about reasonable amounts web-surfing, being on hacker-news or doing l…

I've always, throughout a 25+ year career, kept personal business on personal devices and work business on work devices, and never cross the streams. Oddly, this is really controversial on HN, though! I've gotten so many weirdly angry responses when suggesting people try it, like it's a huge inconvenience to just bring a personal phone to work in order to do your banking and fuck around posting on HN. It's so much ea…

> I've always, throughout a 25+ year career, kept personal business on personal devices and work business on work devices, and never cross the streams.

Interestingly, I have a similar career and I have never ever split personal and work businesses on different notebooks/phones. On the other hand I would never even consider working with a company that monitors my screen or has insight into the computer I'm working on.