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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

#361

Post by foepys »

pjerem wrote: post #354
j45 wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You never really owned what you typed or said at work in to their laptops, into their accounts using their software.

Idk in the US but in France you are allowed to have personal data on your work computer. Though you have to label it as personal (like creating a « Personal » folder or label and your employer can still access it in case of suspicion but he must do it in your physical presence and accompanied with a witness, generally a representative of the employees. So you theoretically don’t have full privacy on this computer but…

Same in Germany, although the employer can forbid this but needs to do this explicitly. Most employers don't forbid personal data on work machines or using your work email for personal things.

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

#362

Post by itake »

Blackthorn wrote: post #169
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.

Couldn't have happened to a more deserving group of people. My irony detector is sparking so badly I think it's about to blow.

My ex-employer (non-FANGA, but still over $10b mkt cap) started using similar software.

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

#363

Post by reroute22 »

dbgrman wrote: post #276

Because ends justify means. To quote Boz himself: “ The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good. It is perhaps the only area where the metrics do tell the true story as far as we are concerned.”

While reality can be anything but.

As far as I understand, there is plenty of research there in disciplines raging from social studies through psychology to game theory and economics, as well as informal simulations, that strongly suggest that human interactions are positive to participants pretty much if and only if those interactions are repeated, which realistically only occurs if participants are circumstantially close already - same neighborhood, same job, family, friends, same school, etc.

One-off interactions are almost invariably toxic with at least one of the participants getting cheated, bullied, or otherwise harmed.

So the whole premise of connecting people unconditionally, including anonymously, automatically, and from opposite sides of the world is inherently broken and doomed to do a lot of damage.

So even Meta's self proclaimed mission is damaging to society if followed, what could possibly at that point be expected from what they actually do, given the combination of basic facts that the primary purpose of any business is to make money, Meta's specific notoriously evident disregard towards ethics, their position as an advertisement business and entertainment provider, being deep into enshitification and market saturation, and of course actual honest mistakes to boot.

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

#364

Post by lanyard-textile »

pjerem wrote: post #354
j45 wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You never really owned what you typed or said at work in to their laptops, into their accounts using their software.

Idk in the US but in France you are allowed to have personal data on your work computer. Though you have to label it as personal (like creating a « Personal » folder or label and your employer can still access it in case of suspicion but he must do it in your physical presence and accompanied with a witness, generally a representative of the employees. So you theoretically don’t have full privacy on this computer but…

I don't think we have sweeping regulations about it, at least in California.

Most companies I've worked at have a policy of some "reasonable personal use" being permitted. The concern is usually focused on the other way around: Companies do not want their IP on your personal machines.

They can certainly look at whatever is on their own machines, however, regardless if it is your personal data or not.

One large caveat: If you do any work on your company's equipment, they may possibly own it, no matter how relevant it is to the company. It's one of the legal tests used to judge the ownership of your work.

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

#365

Post by saghm »

trinsic2 wrote: post #215
reaperducer wrote: post #127

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. 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.

No to disagree with you here because I wholly support this position. But I can see the problem from both angles. The problem, it seems to me, is that, and Im not sure which came first, employees started being reckless at work, probably because employers stopped caring about the treatment of their workers, which ramped up the viscous cycle to where we are now. I can see an argument for companies not trusting there emp…

If "most" employees are corrupt and have terrible ethics, why is the company hiring them in the first place? I don't think I've ever worked anywhere I thought that a majority of my coworkers fit this description. This sounds pretty much identical to what the parent commentee said: it's a hiring problem. Either the company is bad at hiring people who don't have these traits or they're actively selecting for it.

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

#367

Post by lynx97 »

2ndorderthought wrote: post #232
Blackthorn wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't have happened to a more deserving group of people. My irony detector is sparking so badly I think it's about to blow.

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 either. They are doing this since a long time, but usually got less publicity.

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

#368

Post by frm88 »

LiamPowell wrote: post #330
dylan604 wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Palantir collect data or just analyze aggregated purchased data? I'm not familiar with the data collecting SDKs available as I don't whore out myself/my sites like that, so maybe there is a pipe directly from them???? Either way, I'd definitely hold those directly responsible for collecting and selling of the data way worse than those that just make use of a product. It's like the war on drugs where those making…

> Does Palantir collect data or just analyze aggregated purchased data? Neither. Palantir makes data management software, they've never been in the business of collecting or analysing data themselves at all. There's generally a fundamental misunderstanding online of what Palantir actually does. Any time you see an article or comment saying something along the lines of "Palantir is stealing your data", consider if it…

Neither. Palantir makes data management software, they've never been in the business of collecting or analysing data themselves at all. There's generally a fundamental misunderstanding online of what Palantir actually does.

This is rather naive. Palantir makes politics by creating and funding a SuperPAC to discredit a former employee who happens to support the RAISE act.

Leading the Future, a super PAC whose funders include the founders of companies like Palantir and OpenAI, is spending millions of dollars this election cycle, and a considerable amount of that money is going toward attack ads against Alex Bores – even though Bores himself used to work for Palantir.

https://youtu.be/znKb71kLG5c?si=5Q9B88bXaGCkgebN

They even have a political manifesto, a thing that a private company dedicated to data analytics, should definitely not have:

https://gizmodo.com/alex-karps-supervillain-manifesto-is-put...

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

#370

Post by Saline9515 »

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…

We had the AI = Actually Indians meme, now we have Actually Indians = AI. The loop has been completed!
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