Who in their right minds would trust this...?
Quite objectively, the track record for management demonstrating bad faith and lying about this is deep and long.
Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min
371–380 of 799 posts
Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min
#372Earlier 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.
Interesting that they never seem to think the executive suite is overpaid -- for some reasons it's always everyone _else_ who is overpaid.
Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min
#373Earlier 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…
I think IT departments also tend to underestimate the risk they pose when they manage machines. Look at Stryker, where intruders used Intune to wipe all the company's devices. The ability to do that shouldn't exist, but the IT department happily rolled out the means of their own destruction in the name of compliance and making their lives easier.
Device management is definitely a big hole to punch into each machine, but, once you're above a handful of staff, managing devices manually is not really tenable, and I do think the restrictions provided by device management have tangible benefits (it's amazing what people will download and run without a thought).
Arguably the risks of the MDM should be assessed and mitigated with some kind of defense in depth approach—highly sensitive things like bulk wipe disabled with multi-person approval required to re-enable, hardware MFA requirements, anomaly detection + alerting for weird behavior, etc etc. I'd argue the risks stem more from badly configured MDM where a compromise of one sysadmin's browser has a company-wide blast radius, rather than the fundamental presence of device management itself.
Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min
#374Earlier 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.
Why would you ever login to a sensitive account on a device you don't own and have root on? Like I trust my employer not to do anything shifty with my banking info, if I were to use it, but I'm not going to take that chance for a dozen reasons.
You probably use direct deposit in which case your employer already has your banking info
Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min
#375I have a serious question to anyone working at Meta and reading this: HOW can you still work at this company!? Why don't you quit this very toxic company, and start working at another place or even on your own? I genuinely don't understand... Let just Meta die!
One thing I have observed so far in SV (haven't been here long) is that folks who work in big tech but aren't from the US don't fully understand the difference in costs depending where you live in the US. I have to wonder if that informs the decision to stay in SV no matter what the work is. Like, intellectually they know that it costs less to live in Beaverton Michigan than it costs to live in Palo Alto. But the mag…
Apart from housing the costs aren’t that much more. You pay the same to travel. You pay the same to buy stuff online. Food is maybe slightly more but it’s not that significant.
Once you get past being able to afford housing it’s insanely lucrative. It’s harder for entry level people of course.
Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min
#376Earlier 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.
Yep, I could probably retire already if it wasn't for the crippling cost of health insurance and healthcare in general (Thanks, USA).
Did you think about doing procedure abroad where they routinely cost 5% of the US cost?
Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min
#377I don't work for Meta, but how many more years do I need to work in tech? I'm in my 40s and my kids are young. I've already set up 529s for them, and am paying for some expensive home upgrades. Maybe when that is finished and I've built up a buffer I can switch industries for the last 5-10 years of my working life. Curious if anyone here has any similar plans.
I'm out in 2 years, late 30's and a decade in IT/Sec, run a security team now.
Going into something like nursing - union gig, a relationship with AI and tracking I'm comfortable with, walking around money, a job I can show my kids that is about service vs. the inhumane aspects of tech, a career that scales despite technology of the next 20 years (or at least my best estimate of these risks).
End of the day, writing on the wall is clear as day
- Automation of a professional class is coming, just like in trading from '90s-2000s. It's ugly, the pros will deny it until the end, but I've seen it happen to the last technically-inclined 500k+ job class that was untouchable by all accounts. Engineers are up, financial analysts are up, jr lawyers are up... that is a scary future, I don't need to wait for 5 years for thought leaders to catch up to this.
- Labor rights and labor conflict are always a thing, it has been fair that SWEs exempted themselves from caring about it pre-AI, but post-AI I'd buckle up. If you're an engineer that has dug into AI heavily, and understand how the nature of your job for the next 5-10 yrs has changed, then you should be thinking about your relative labor advantage. Is it still a cake 500k/yr job if you're tracked every 30 minutes? Give me a break.
Fwiw, this tracking shows up at Big Corp and should be expected - Fortune 500s, likely FAANGs, and other spots with top-line insider threat risk. There are specific vendors worth seeing if they are installed via the MDMs or local processes.
Past that, most IT/Sec teams can do it with existing tools, but it's often down the line after getting capable detection/response for real security issues, insider threat, and then monitoring a workforce if so desired.
Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min
#378Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Why wouldn't Meta also directly sell data if nobody cared about this distinction?
Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min
#379Earlier quoted context omitted.
not to defend zuck but its a common misconception that meta sells data advertisers dont see the personal data they buy for ad placement
There is no misconception. Meta also sells data, next to selling advertising space.
They literally don't. Data is their moat; selling it would be counter to their financial success.
Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min
#380Very generous and 30 minutes more than Meta allows non-employees to opt out of Meta's tracking. A clear company benefit!