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

#311

Post by gaiagraphia » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 3:54 PM UTC

jkl5xx wrote: post #266

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…

This is a pretty uncharitable perspective. Most folks I know working at Meta or Amazon aren’t morally bankrupt. They just have kids, debt, poor parents with health problems, etc. They work at Meta to support their loved ones. And it’s not like you can walk onto the street and just wave down a morally superior job with similar pay and benefits. Blame the tech oligarchs, not the workers.

"Supporting their loved ones" is doing a lot of moral heavy lifting here, though.

History's littered with people trotting out this line when they've valued luxury and status over morals.

The more you interact with something, the more you are part of it and help it prosper. "Blame the kings!" is a little bit too simple, imo.

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

#312

Post by Barbing » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 3:54 PM UTC

reconnecting wrote: post #242

anticorporate wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I quit tech at 40. I still do cool things with technology, but now at a community-owned grocery co-op. I can't recommend leaving tech highly enough. My cortisol levels are so much lower than they used to be. I don't have to schedule my life around EMEA and APAC meetings outside of my normal hours. I only work more than 40 hours a week if I feel like it, which I sometimes do, because I actually enjoy my work now. I ma…

> I only work more than 40 hours a week if I feel like it This line really hurts! I made my first website in 1999 and my first online business in 2010, and I've never had a real vacation without emails since then. However, in my 40s, as self-employed, I've never paid myself a six-figure salary either. So perhaps I need to reconsider my plans for the rest of my life.

You got this!

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

#313

Post by neilv » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 3:54 PM UTC

If I ran a mass surveillance and manipulation company that's not known for great ethics, and I managed to hire tons of people despite that reputation, then probably at least a few of those hires will be unethical/disloyal enough to someday do something against me.

So, whenever one of my employees opts out of surveillance for 30 minutes... is exactly when they secretly get maximum surveillance attention. Because what is that weasel up to.

Humorously, when an employee thinks they are off-the-record is actually when my special security unit is operating off-the-record. With questionable methods. (On-the-record, they spend all their time making employee badges and infosec reminder posters for the kitchenettes.)

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

#314

Post by layer8 » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 3:55 PM UTC

d1sxeyes wrote: post #264

stingraycharles wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the keyword is “can”. It is allowed, contrary to eg the EU, where this is not allowed.

It’s not true that it’s not allowed in the EU. There’s the Barbalescu ruling which is case law that says employers must fulfill a bunch of criteria around informing employees, the necessity of the monitoring, and they are not allowed to impose blanket bans on private use, but it is still legal to monitor employees in the EU.

It can be legal, but demonstrating the necessity is a significant bar.

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

#315

Post by kennywinker » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 3:56 PM UTC

greenavocado wrote: post #57

If you are wondering why they are doing things like this at FAANG, its because of this: YouTube /watch?v=YTuM-GS8Qak

Because someone made a video glamorizing their life working at microsoft? I don’t get the issue here - she’s basically doing free promotion for the hiring department

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

#316

Post by bloggie » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 3:57 PM UTC

jjulius wrote: post #262

yubblegum wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a dear friend who works at Meta. The conclusion that all meta workers are valuing money over "something good" is not reasonable. This fellow, who I know to be a good man of excellent character btw, for example has to support his family (which all together number 6), and be prepared to pay tuition for 4 kids starting in a decade and then one after another for the other 3! Is providing for your family and their…

There are many, many ways to provide for one's family, Meta is but one. And I say this as a father providing for mine. Additionally, putting the blame for using Meta products on the users in spite of all of what we know about how the company has strived to make the productive terribly addictive is a very wild take.

After many years in research science I had an opportunity to work in applied sciences in the petroleum industry. This is an industry that knows that the writing is on the wall for them. Resources are finite and peak demand may well be behind us. (Almost everyone I worked with drove electric cars.) That does not stop the petroleum industry (drug dealers) from responding to economic demand (addicts). When I was younger I saw the petroleum industry as evil, but if there was no demand there would be no supply. Who is to blame? Working in this industry changed my perspective on addiction, drinking, gambling, infinite scrolling. I used to believe that the pushers were solely at fault, and some of them certainly are. But I find it hard to blame only Facebook for their practices.

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

#317

Post by _-_-__-_-_- » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 3:58 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 do the same. Its very easy today with portable devices and plentiful mobile data. I have my personal phone and personal laptop, connected to mobile data, for lunch breaks or the odd search I need to do during the workday. My work laptop and associated accounts are strictly for work activities and information.

Edit: From what my employer has explained, they do not have a live-view of our workstations. They can (and have) changed Google Workspace or Microsoft account passwords in order to access the accounts for internal investigations or sharing in the case of a criminal investigation. Of course, once they have the work device they could do forensics on the work device. They also have security logs from badges and alarm codes and video from security cameras in public areas.

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

#318

Post by kennywinker » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 3:58 PM UTC

latexr wrote: post #246

> new controls will allow employees to pause the data collection for "up to 30 minutes at a time" as well as request exemptions from the initiative altogether. If they deny your exemption, make a tool that every 30 minutes fakes a bunch of nonsensical keystrokes for a few seconds, then automatically request another 30 minute pause. If they ever find out and confront you about it, say you’ve always heard Meta leadersh…

This is a perfect reason to unionize. Individual action is never as powerful as collective action.

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

#319

Post by jopsen » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 3:58 PM UTC

schnitzelstoat wrote: post #174

macNchz wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something that genuinely runs the gamut across different companies—plenty don't even know the serial numbers of company-owned machines, never mind which devices individuals have, while others do effectively have live feeds of every employee's screen available to managers at all times. In between you have many businesses that manage their devices but only insofar as to enforce some basic protection and reserve…

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.

Moreover: what is the upside?

Spying on employees is not free. If you want to spend serious resources doing it, there has to be an upside.

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

#320

Post by ryandrake » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 4:00 PM UTC

mountain_peak wrote: post #147

JKCalhoun wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your call, of course. But when in your situation, I looked at when my youngest was to head off to college (when the nest would be empty) and I marked my calendar. To your point, while the rest would empty when I was at the age of 57, it didn't seem like I would need to continue to accumulate the spoils of a software engineer when I had the 529's, the 401k by that point [1]. And so at the appointed time, I walked away…

About a decade or so ago, I started to see people I used to work with working at Home Depot and Costco. It struck me as odd seeing these brilliant developers stocking shelves and providing advice on sanded vs. unsanded grout. The more I spoke with, the more I realized that they were there entirely by choice. Most were given packages to "retire", but they were still in their 50s and their spouses hadn't retired yet, h…

Haha, strangely enough that's also my post-retirement plan. Just dip over to Home Depot. And, I also know ex-tech workers who made the same move once they had enough to retire. Wonder what it is about that particular store that's appealing.