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.
That is the natural result. They're selecting for people that don't have that reaction, or those that can suppress it.
Interesting, they know which sites the employee is visiting and they also know the mouse clicks. So they can know exactly which links they are clicking too. They are able to gain visibility even into https sites.
That doesn't make any sense. 1. Why use their employee's data to fingerprint input? They could do that to a billion+ of their users instead. 2. Input fingerprinting is multi-decades old science, there are already production products that do this.
Are there products that do this with all of the other metadata that meta now collects? At the scale that meta collects them? My guess is no.
I would be highly surprised if they don't do this already for bot detection... but again, if they want to do it to track people on the internet, the data that would be useful is data from the internet, which they have an incredible wealth of -- not a dataset that is several orders of magnitude smaller from their internal employees' desktops.
a bathroom stall is also a company property. Does the note about not expecting privacy extend there too?
At the risk of sounding like an LLM, a laptop is not just "something you get at work", it's literally your work tool. If you were hired at Shit Producers Inc as a defecator, you'd damn bet they would surveil the bathroom stalls there.
That doesn't mean it's suddenly ok to monitor every second of your life while you work.
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…
> It's kind of hard to blame individuals when they either are rightfully consumed by worrying about their own welfare or are for whatever reason not as seminally hyperaware or woke as we can be in the west. If you care that your employer is being unethical (such as storing your keystrokes), that's being hyperaware, woke? I know the definition of woke can stretch like taffy, but it now seems dislodged from its origins…
I'm not referring to that, obviously; I'm referring to Metas impacts worldwide.
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…
> It's very western of us to always be tracking the conseqentiality of our actions even when we're just the cog in a wheel An awful lot of Eastern philosophy would disagree with you.
Not speaking philosophically. I'm just talking about my experience on the ground working with chinese (as a fellow chinese). Some of them are interested in global affairs, certainly, but I find it to be more common from people raised in the west.
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…
You remind me of my former, younger self and I applaud the appeal you are making to our better selves. All I'm stating is simply that many people don't care, or can't be made to care. But further, there is a pontificating nature about the way you reason about these workers. In the case of my colleagues at Meta, many feel that they are so fortunate to be able to work in the US at all. Even if they did care, it would be rational for them to continue working there against their moral qualms anyways. Because no one would choose to go back to their home country and do the same work for a paltry fraction of the pay.
>You know you are at work and monitored. unless you're in a jurisdiction that has anti-surveillance workplace laws, which if you don't should probably think about before Mark Zuckerberg gets the idea to monitor to your body temperature from below the waistline
- workplace being monitored (US) - getting paid half the salary (EU) I know which one most people pick.
without a doubt liberty and privacy don't seem to be particularly high up on the list of priorities in the land of the free. Although if the American founders had 24/7 surveilled, compliant, worker drones at mega corporations in mind for an extra check might be worth pondering