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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

#491

Post by butlike »

isodev wrote: post #461
nikkwong wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Former meta employee. It's not like people have an unlimited number of places to work, even if they have Meta on their resume. Many of my colleagues (and myself included) had struggled in the job market in the past before landing at Meta. If it's work for Meta, or suffer more tumult in the hiring market; it's easy to understand why many might decide to take the offer even with the moral implications. I used to bring…

What Meta does (and here I want to be clear that you can replace Meta with Apple, Microsoft, Google, Palantir...) is eventually public knowledge, profusely discussed even on HN. This means substantial amount of people have been aware, for decades. And even if "just quit" is not an option - why not push for policy to regulate these corps? Why is it that after all this time, these same corps now also own at least 1 bra…

> And even if "just quit" is not an option - why not push for policy to regulate these corps? Why is it that after all this time, these same corps now also own at least 1 branch of the US government?

Because money is the current representation and approximation of power. It used to be "the yams," but now it's money.

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

#492

Post by butlike »

gdhkgdhkvff wrote: post #201
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.

This is a naive take on this. Do you think it stops with just metamates(lmao that’s what they call themselves) being surveilled? Nope. This is the exact type of thing that software IC’s should reject in solidarity. Being happy with BadCompanyX trampling employee expectations directly allows for GoodCompanyY to enact the same policies.

More like Metamites amirite?! Annoying af call an exterminator

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

#493

Post by avgDev »

kakacik wrote: post #397
Blackthorn wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm happy to see the metamates (lol) receiving the same pain they inflict on others. Maybe it will teach them a lesson in solidarity. You can't have solidarity about a bad thing with the people who are doing the bad thing! They have to stop doing the bad thing first! That's how solidarity works!

Why do you think they don't fully know what they are doing, they are smart folks. Now we all know how everybody needs to be the hero of their story, but self-lying only gets you so far in life, sub-consciousness will give you shit. Don't put some mystery where simple greed is perfect enough explanation and there is little worry about others, some could use the word 'selfish' too. US society at large seems to me struc…

I've lived long enough to know that "smart" folks can be extremely dumb.

There are people who are naturally gifted and intelligent. These people can just pick up and learn different things on their own.

There are also people who do well at certain tasks and their life allowed them to obtain a higher education.

For example, I used to assume doctors were smart. However, the reality is that a small number of doctors are smart/intelligent people. Others are just going by the book, you throw them a curve ball and they fold. This applies to people at Meta, Google, NASA, and any organization.

I would argue smart/intelligent people see the negative impact of things BEFORE it affects THEM directly, there were people whistleblowing the real impact of smoking, fossil fuels before the information became public and well known.

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

#494

Post by avgDev »

DharmaPolice wrote: post #459
gamerslexus wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They could help more people but by replacing you they might just create another person who may also need help.

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

#495

Post by 2ndorderthought »

butlike wrote: post #488
2ndorderthought wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The workers have always been assets though. They turn JIRA tickets into money. Any notion a company would treat a person as a human being and not a means to an end is unfounded, full-stop. The company is a machine that makes money. Machines do not have feelings.

Machines don't have feelings. But if a human is subjected to machine treatment there should be safe guards. Otherwise we all may as well live in goo filled tubes like in the matrix. At some point we have to decide what is fair treatment for human beings, similar to how we decide fair treatment for lab rats and lab puppies.

Would it benefit neural link to dog food their employees? What if there was a 5% chance of death. What if the employees signed in the dotted line anyway. Someone might say, sure that's fair play. Others might say as a society we shouldn't allow people to be treated as assets.

Is it reasonable to change someone's job description to having every action they take be subjected to company ownership? Depends on who you ask I guess.

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

#496

Post by renegade-otter »

JuniperMesos wrote: post #239
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.

I already assume that on a work computer everything I'm doing could be monitored by work IT. At every job I've had, I've made a point of not using work hardware for anything I even remotely thought someone at the job might object to. Instead I use my own hardware for that kind of thing - I own a smartphone, I own multiple computers, this is not hard to do. When I worked at a startup that had some internal conflict be…

There is no expectation of privacy on your work machine - that's a given.

We know this is not for security - this data will be collected and weaponized against employees during layoffs. Meta is already doing this for those who are not enthusiastically switching from coding to prompting.

I expect to be monitored, I do not expect to be watched.

If I need to kick back for 20 minutes to think on a problem, I don't want the company to be chewing me out because my mouse movements were not frantic.

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

#497

Post by renegade-otter »

everdrive wrote: post #55
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.

Yes, but I cannot imagine Meta cares about chilling their employees. They're deep into the "extract more value" phase and are no longer bringing in the cutting edge talent.

Right, it's extraction on steroids. They can no longer extract more from customers, so employees are obviously next.

In a healthy capitalism, you take care of customers, then employees, then shareholders. In that exact order. Right now the incentives are ass-backwards.

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

#498

Post by munchler »

lofaszvanitt wrote: post #463
DocTomoe wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just like chefs... a lot of lowlives lurk there too.

Wut? How are chefs like waterboarders?

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

#499

Post by chrisellwood »

I've been building tools around screen capture for a bit and every time one of these threads comes up the conversation ends up mushing two things together that aren't actually the same.

Hooking keystrokes, mouse, screenshots on a local machine is what every decent journaling or timesheet app already does, and nobody cares because the file stays on the user's machine. Meta isn't getting dragged because they figured out how to instrument work laptops. They're getting dragged because they're the ones holding the logs, and "just for training" is a promise that hasn't aged well anywhere it's been deployed the last ten years.

Annoying side effect — the genuinely useful version of this, local activity logs you own for your own records, gets lumped in with bossware every time this comes up. Most freelancers and consultants I know would pay for the former. Most of them would quit over the latter.

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

#500

Post by GuinansEyebrows »

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.

> it would be an enormous social good as the resources saved could go somewhere else

they can, will and are going directly into like 9 sociopath's pockets at your peril.

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