Is this even legal in the EU?
Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min
421–430 of 799 posts
Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min
#422The world smallest violin will be rendered in React... Why do these employees get this generous toggle, when we got zero minutes and a shadow profile?
Pretty sure Meta isn’t screen recording your laptop 24/7
Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min
#423It'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…
> Oh, here I am on hacker-news when I should be working.
What else am I supposed to be doing while Cursor does its thing?
Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min
#424It'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…
Ridiculous tracking happened before AI too. Go read the book about Bridgewater, describing, among other things, how internal security worked when it was led by James Comey (yes, the one you know from the news, and was later FBI director)
Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min
#425Earlier quoted context omitted.
A heavily unionized tech industry over the last 30yrs would be an interesting counterfactual. IMO the ability for individual employees to negotiate for themselves is a positive? As is being able to get rid of bad performers Unionization would hurt the startup ecosystem, at least at the margins, no?
This is a flawed argument, the current system gets rid of good performers all the time, and we have evidence of wage suppression, so employees don't get to negotiate on fair terms. You just get stuck in your pay band. I agree it would be a good counter-factual, but I think the differences would be more around industry stability. Particularly, I think the ability for employees to push back against historical threats l…
Enrolment in computer science skyrocketed five-fold from 2009 to 2024. Dropped 15% since, for obvious reasons.
Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min
#426Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've never seen anyone do that across almost two decades in tech, it's a security risk that would absolutely get you the wrong kind of attention in an organization that takes itself seriously.
Personal laptops go on guest wifi with zero access to company resources, just like personal phones
+ everybody working in tech has a large mobile data plan, no reason to even connect to the wifi guest network.
Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min
#427Reminds me of one of the more brilliant passages in Snow Crash , describing work in "Fed Land"... ''' Y.T's mom pulls up the new memo, checks the time, and starts reading it. The estimated reading time is 15.62 minutes. Later, when Marietta does her end-of-day statistical roundup, sitting in her private office at 9:00 P.M., she will see the name of each employee and next to it, the amount of time spent reading this m…
Truly terrifying. I'll admit I was expecting one of the near-15.62 options to be "acceptable". How wrong I was; I should have seen that coming.
As one of the below comments says, you just don't know what level of snooping is going on. If you're reading this $CEO, hi!
Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min
#428Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have been working from home for the last 8 years but when meeting the team onsite I have seen people bringing small personal laptops and ipads so it seems quite common. Those days at the office were so sporadic that I could do with my smartphone only.
I've never seen anyone do that across almost two decades in tech, it's a security risk that would absolutely get you the wrong kind of attention in an organization that takes itself seriously.
So I assume your company that take itself seriously ask you to leave your personal smartphone at home.
Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min
#429It'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…
> We will soon have to brace ourselves for an absolute draconian level of tracking. Somehow this reminds me of the old adage in finance :"The optimal amount of fraud is not 0" Meaning that you could of course come up with a system in your accounting or banking or stocks or whatever that is totally 100% fraud proof. But that system would be so onerous that none would use it. They'd go back to a more fraudulent system…
Same principle as too much security. One of the things that contributes to this is that the safety side usually doesn't have any incentive to reign itself in.
There is an old adage for that general idea.
"The treatment should not be worse than the disease"
Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min
#430No one mentioned Orwell so far? Well, in 1984 the protagonist learns after a while, that inner party members had the amazing perk of being able to turn off the mandatory surveillance screen for up to 30 minutes. But I guess in this case the workers still will be tracked by the usual Meta tracking that applies to everyone surfing the internet.
“It is unwise even for members of the Inner Party to turn off the telescreen for more than half an hour.”