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Petition against Meta's employee training data collection for ML models

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Re: Petition against Meta's employee training data collection for ML models

#61

Post by titanomachy »

tdeck wrote: post #27

People who are focusing on whether we should have sympathy for Meta employees here are missing the point. Meta employees have some of the strongest bargaining power in our industry. This particular imposition is undesirable to almost everyone. There is no upside in it for employees. Therefore, if Meta employees can be forced to accept it, everyone will be. And you'd better believe that there will be a flood of compan…

> Therefore, if Meta employees can be forced to accept it, everyone will be.

Meta also has a strong bargaining position. The attractiveness of the job is almost entirely money, which is pretty universal, so they can quite easily replace individuals. Other (less wealthy) companies might rely on goodwill and sense of belonging or purpose to retain employees, which weakens their ability to do things like this.

Re: Petition against Meta's employee training data collection for ML models

#62

Post by quietthrow »

clapthewind wrote: post #57
quietthrow wrote: post #56

The way I look at it is this: There is an entity that provides product/service and makes money. A lot of money. Like mind boggling sums of money. That entity has made a deal with a set of humans to give some of that money (which for the humans is very large and or at least hard to ignore) in exchange for their time and skills. The deal is mutual. This entity is now changing the deal somewhat and the set of humans don…

> almost entire set of humans that it made the deal with walks away from the deal You missed mentioning a million new humans will gladly walk into the deal. This is a list of 1600 people who should be alrady looking out because meta won't be after this signature.

It’s implied in someways I would say. that’s why these folks creating any meaningful leverage is a black swan event. Say all of them walk away and meta can get a million new people it’s still a massive risk for the meta (entity) as they may never be able to recover fully. The million new people when band to gather will not form the same larger entity that was existing earlier that made a lot of money. They are not going to be productive day one or year one. What will emerge is a new entity and it could make even more money or even less money as things may never be the same. And that’s a large risk that Meta may or may not take. But without leverage created by banding together / complete solidarity Meta will never be forever to face the risk of it being transformed into a completely different entity that may or may not be as successful as it’s today. And that’s the power of leverage.

Re: Petition against Meta's employee training data collection for ML models

#63

Post by EPWN3D »

compass_copium wrote: post #44
tdb7893 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People uphold a million cruel systems every day, their sort of hypocrisy is so common I've found it just to accept that it's how humans work (especially in a situation like this where their paycheck requires them to not see all the privacy problems they all support). I know I'm hypocritical about a bunch of stuff in my life. Your perspective might be the more reasonable one but the way I see it, the hypocrisy is frus…

...it's the intrinsic nature of the programmer to have no scruples and work for the shittiest company that can employ them because it offers a big paycheck?

Programmers aren't that special once they get a mortgage and a family.

Re: Petition against Meta's employee training data collection for ML models

#64

Post by quietthrow »

titanomachy wrote: post #60
quietthrow wrote: post #56

The way I look at it is this: There is an entity that provides product/service and makes money. A lot of money. Like mind boggling sums of money. That entity has made a deal with a set of humans to give some of that money (which for the humans is very large and or at least hard to ignore) in exchange for their time and skills. The deal is mutual. This entity is now changing the deal somewhat and the set of humans don…

I wouldn’t put it past meta leadership to just fire the lot of them for daring to make a “demand” of their betters. The only thing that might restrain them is employment law, but they have good lawyers and might find a way around it. And meta engineers will never bargain collectively. If you’ve spent time there you understand that it is some of the least fertile ground in the world for such ideas. Anyone who entertai…

It’s that self interest is what got them to meta in the first place. These people are highly skilled and smart at what they do. They worked probably extremely hard for a large swath of their life to get where they are with meta. It’s one of those classic what got you here won’t get you there scenarios. Self interest has its limits (and so does collectivism). The real intelligence is in knowing when one has stoped working for you and when it’s working against you. Self interest / collectivism etc These are all just tools. We as humans are best when our indentity is that of a tools user (and not that of a single tool user - it’s possible and you may be rewarded for it well but it has its limits and it certainly confines what you can do has a human. It’s a limiting way to live at best )

Re: Petition against Meta's employee training data collection for ML models

#66

Post by siliconc0w »

Randomly I was thinking about how to "prove" you are a distinct engineer who works at a company without revealing your identity.

I feel like labor organizers should offer employee verification as a free service to get people to sign who fear retaliation. Essentially upload your W2, get a token, sign petition with token. Or maybe just mail out a QR sticker to place in an employee-only area...

Re: Petition against Meta's employee training data collection for ML models

#67

Post by [deleted] »

siliconc0w wrote: post #66

Randomly I was thinking about how to "prove" you are a distinct engineer who works at a company without revealing your identity. I feel like labor organizers should offer employee verification as a free service to get people to sign who fear retaliation. Essentially upload your W2, get a token, sign petition with token. Or maybe just mail out a QR sticker to place in an employee-only area...

[deleted]

Re: Petition against Meta's employee training data collection for ML models

#70

Post by tdb7893 »

compass_copium wrote: post #44
tdb7893 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People uphold a million cruel systems every day, their sort of hypocrisy is so common I've found it just to accept that it's how humans work (especially in a situation like this where their paycheck requires them to not see all the privacy problems they all support). I know I'm hypocritical about a bunch of stuff in my life. Your perspective might be the more reasonable one but the way I see it, the hypocrisy is frus…

...it's the intrinsic nature of the programmer to have no scruples and work for the shittiest company that can employ them because it offers a big paycheck?

I've found that everyone has some hypocrisies that they cling to (it's really hard to see it in yourself). I believe I do a better job of it that Facebook employees, it would be really hard to be more blatantly hypocritical than this, but it's not like I don't make similar errors all the time.

Especially on a post about them doing something decent, I can accept they are obviously hypocritical and just not be concerned with it right now.

Edit: for something like this I think about the advice "don't punish someone for doing what you want them to do". This is Facebook employees publicly signing a pro-privacy document. It's obviously self serving so it would be weird to really praise them as people who protect privacy but I'm happy to support them in this regardless.

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