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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

#531

Post by ludicrousdispla »

nikkwong wrote: post #434
isodev wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know right, so much pain and horror has been unleashed in the world by Meta… I have zero sympathy for their employees. Someone should’ve said no to developing this tech in the first place but here we are.

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…

This has nothing to do with politics, or political talk. People's complaints are about dishonesty, abuse, and manipulation on the part of Meta.

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

#532

Post by nikkwong »

nikkwong wrote: post #434
isodev wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know right, so much pain and horror has been unleashed in the world by Meta… I have zero sympathy for their employees. Someone should’ve said no to developing this tech in the first place but here we are.

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…

Was quite tired when i wrote this; just want to be on the record saying that i don't necessarily think that people in the east haphazardly just do whatever they're told. there's more nuance to it than that; but i just observe generally that in the east there isn't a culture of political motivation or organizing, or democracy at all. So it's not at all surprising when people don't assign any political meaning to their work—even in the cases where one so overtly exists.

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

#533

Post by tpsvca » 

  The interesting design question isn't "can we collect this" — it's "what do we lose by not collecting it."                                                                                
                 
  I run a small web tool. Early on I considered session recording, heatmaps, keystroke timing. Every one of those would have made the product slightly better to optimize. I didn't add any of them. Not because of regulation, but because I didn't want to be in the business of explaining to users what I was doing with their cursor path.
Meta is in a different position — these are employees, not customers, and the stated goal is AI training. But the logic is the same: once you've decided the data is useful, the collection feels justified. The question is who gets to decide "useful to whom."

The part that bothers me most isn't the mouse movements. It's that there's no symmetry employees can't see what Meta does with their cursor data the same way Meta can see what the employee's cursor does.

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

#534

Post by hnav »

munchler wrote: post #498
lofaszvanitt wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Wut? How are chefs like waterboarders?

presumably they were abused as line cooks or whatever and once they make sous chefs they become abusers. Similar dynamics exist in jail, in fraternities, etc.

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

#535

Post by joquarky »

avaer wrote: post #293
lukeschlather wrote: post #266

I really don't understand how this is legal. I guess Facebook maybe doesn't actually have any compliance requirements in the USA, but time series screenshots of any SRE's screen are going to contain data that should not be stored by some data vacuum. I know Meta has a reputation for shitty data handling practices and US regulations are light compared to Europe, but how are they planning on securing passwords, encrypt…

This data is going to get leaked in a breach. It will be used against you in a court of law. It will be used for training and (regardless of what anyone says) will be used to fire you once the AI can do your job. And when all of the above happens Meta will be absolved of any responsibility. I don't understand how it's legal either. I guess we need laws against it yesterday.

Same with employee surveys, BTW.

Never trust that you are anonymous.

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

#538

Post by zeruch »

2ndorderthought wrote: post #232
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.

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…

"Companies have shown us that IP going to AI providers is acceptable" This is where I'm expecting future collision; you can't both value IP for it's training value, and yet devalue it for the actual sources of IP (people owning their own likenesses or orgs collecting data from their own activity)

It's going to cause a major break at some point, probably sooner than later.

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

#539

Post by mizzao »

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.

Ah, fantastic, gives off Aperture Science (from Half-life 2) vibes!

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

#540

Post by mgiampapa »

VygmraMGVl wrote: post #344
mgiampapa wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many many moons ago I refused to implement a calendar event scraping system at Meta where it would look at all of your meetings on the calendar and do "analysis". IDK what ever happened to that task, I assume it died a death of no one else being willing to do it. This was probably 2011 or so, I can only imagine it has gotten so much worse.

It's pretty easy to scrape your own calendar events in Meta. I'm not sure about others' as I'm not a manager, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were visible as long as someone is in your report chain. (I work at Meta)

It's been a while so I don't remember the specifics, but the I think the request came from someone working at Accenture from one of the FinTech teams? At the time the proposal had both technical limitations and performance implications on top of the privacy issues. To do it right would have meant standing up a new set of client exchange endpoints and permissions that were far too permissive so the task just got ignored for a long time and I think that manager behind it went away eventually or they settled for public data inside the company.

The only report chain based permissions were around distribution lists which were just some powershell scripts that walked AD every night. These also got used for security groups to gate access to some things. Be default, calendars were visible to all authenticated users unless you made them private or individual events private. The meeting tool leveraged this for example.

I was working on corp email (among other things) there from 2009 to 2016, so I can't speak for now.

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