Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

451–460 of 561 posts

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

#451

Post by roysting »

sylware wrote: post #426
lanyard-textile wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It is even worse in France: if you code open source "on the side" of you work, at home, the company which employs you may claim the copyrights of it. I had to add explicit exclusion of this claim of copyrights in my job contracts to protect my personal work. That was a few years back, dunno if that was fixed.

That is not correct; assuming you are not using an employer’s equipment on employer’s time, and/or working on what the employer pays you to do for them or are working on something that is competing and a few other reasonable caveats.

It’s actually quite reasonable and logical.

https://french-business-law.com/french-legislation-art/artic...

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

#453

Post by DocTomoe »

Xmd5a wrote: post #445

Makes me think of how the US army trains their waterboarders: by waterboarding them first. The goal is to manufacture a lack of empathy along the lines of: "why should I treat this person better than I was treated".

You'd think the natural result would be 'This was horrible; this trainer is a psychopath. I am not going to do that to another human being.'

But then, we're talking about humans, especially the violence-enjoying strata of humans here.

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

#455

Post by gamerslexus »

DharmaPolice wrote: post #448
gamerslexus wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought mass quitting in solidarity would happen when programmers realize how their work is used to train AI and replace them. How many quit because of that? Doesn't seem like many. Apparently, money wins over principles for 99% of us. How is this different and how are we better than Meta employees?

I don't think the two things are comparable. While it would be inconvenient for me personally if I was replaced by AI, it would be an enormous social good as the resources saved could go somewhere else. The same could not be said about everyone under constant surveillance by some megacorp or the government.

Are you so sure that replacing humans is "enormous social good"? For whom is it good, exactly?

Also, capturing keystrokes and mouse movements only when at work and on work computer isn't really constant surveillance. Capturing all our code, text, photo and video (made at work or at home) seems worse and we don't bat an eye.

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

#456

Post by sietsietnoac »

By all means, they have the right to do so, since those are their assets. For what it's worth, it will give them a good dataset for their agent to improve integration with the browser and operating system.

Martin Niemöller's "First They Came" fits perfectly and it shows how hypocritical it is to approach the subject of ai training only when it applies to you. What a Wonderful World!

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

#457

Post by c-oreills »

reroute22 wrote: post #363
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…

> human interactions are positive to participants pretty much if and only if those interactions are repeated

> One-off interactions are almost invariably toxic

I think these claims are too strong. I can believe that there's less incentive to treat people well when you don't expect to repeat interactions.

To give a mundane counter-example: last week I had a flight where I chatted on-and-off with the person next to me. I had zero expectations of repeat interactions with them following the flight, and it was still a friendly and courteous exchange, on both sides.

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

#459

Post by DharmaPolice »

gamerslexus wrote: post #455
DharmaPolice wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the two things are comparable. While it would be inconvenient for me personally if I was replaced by AI, it would be an enormous social good as the resources saved could go somewhere else. The same could not be said about everyone under constant surveillance by some megacorp or the government.

Are you so sure that replacing humans is "enormous social good"? For whom is it good, exactly? Also, capturing keystrokes and mouse movements only when at work and on work computer isn't really constant surveillance. Capturing all our code, text, photo and video (made at work or at home) seems worse and we don't bat an eye.

I work in a non-profit sector, if they could save money by replacing me they could use the money elsewhere where they desperately need money. So lots of people would benefit. That same principle wouldn't apply if I worked for some mega corp of course.

But the discussion was about Meta employees in general. They're heavily involved in the second type of surveillance that you alude to.

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

#460

Post by _the_inflator »

Judging through a behavioral scientist lenses, this is pretty exciting.

Don't get me wrong. It is not to applaud here, it is simply fascinating looking through a factual lens here.

And maybe there will be more questions than answers. And I bet this is going to be funny, when there won't be a clear picture in the end. What are high performer, low performer anyway? There are many pieces missing. I for example do a lot of visuals using a notebook with a pencil. To this day I find Miro etc. distracting and for my creativity to distracting. Hand writing is different to typewriting. I am way faster in the last case and associate through everything until I lose track of the main thing. Not with notes on paper. I utilize this fact, don't go for one thing over the other, but bloat is the result of doing everything virtually.

So how would my keystrokes then look like? I don't know. Highly efficient, maybe, but lots and lots of gaps without hitting the keys.

Low performers? I was overlooking over 500 engineers, did over 400 interviews, build departments from the ground up, watched people do work and helping them via inhouse developed tools to work better while having more fun.

So I think in Gauss often times and low performers, a term, I despise, but it is used for simplicity, aren't really doing nothing, in fact they work a lot, it is just the content or method that is so bad.

My best devs but a lot of consideration into architecture and communication - I trained them. They fell key decisions and helped teams get better.

The industrious low performers complained about them, that they rarely are doing "the work" on their PC. Well, well.

So, would I feel comfortable? No. And don't do to others - as the saying goes.

But if there won't be any consequences just data which cannot be tight to a worker, or and if, it can only be used to benefit them, I would happily take part in such a data gathering, because we all do personal optimization and I am curious about what the data "says" vs. subjective feeling.

On the other hand, tracking might be inevitable - hear me out - if these people are working on NDAs etc. Leakage is monitored anyway, make no mistake. So it sounds like closing a gap.

Tough, very tough.

I tend to say no one gets ousted in corporate companies for their mistakes but by their foes. So data is one thing, the one stabbing you another.

Post reply on HN