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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

#541

Post by j45 »

pjerem wrote: post #354
j45 wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You never really owned what you typed or said at work in to their laptops, into their accounts using their software.

Idk in the US but in France you are allowed to have personal data on your work computer. Though you have to label it as personal (like creating a « Personal » folder or label and your employer can still access it in case of suspicion but he must do it in your physical presence and accompanied with a witness, generally a representative of the employees. So you theoretically don’t have full privacy on this computer but…

Reasonable personal use does not at all in any universe imply privacy from a personal perspective.

Is the same reason why they have to say reasonable.

It’s best to have separate devices so they just don’t have the intelligence about you. That can be permanent, left behind, and then increasingly possibly available to AI models forever.

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

#544

Post by balamatom »

computably wrote: post #77
balamatom wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh. What do you reckon would have happened if you'd hired them anyway?

What? Hiring is a contract between employer (company entity) and employee. No individual "you" can hire anybody except through the company's official process. If HR says "no we won't extend an offer," a lowly HM extending an offer would be clear-cut fraud.

I meant what would have happened - and to whom - if HR had greenlighted the offer, but others' posts pretty much clarified that for me, thanks.

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

#545

Post by rexpop »

seanp2k2 wrote: post #170
rexpop wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spend the majority of my adult life working, and you're telling me I should spend it surveilled?

You already do and your consent is part of your employment. Check your employee handbook, search for things like "data privacy" and understand how https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ30.pdf applies in the modern world, especially around AI. TL;DR companies can do whatever they want with your work / observe you and you have no real meaningful recourse.

I'm sorry, did God Almighty write the employee handbook?

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

#546

Post by rexpop »

satvikpendem wrote: post #271
ryandrake wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im pretty surprised you're getting so much flak for this. This is the least controversial opinion I've seen on HN. I've been working for ~30 years, and every job I've had, if you actually looked at the IT policies, they were all very clear that work devices were for work, personal devices were for personal stuff. It wouldn't even occur to me to cross the streams. Carrying a second phone for personal stuff is a trivia…

I'm also very surprised, so much so that one of my comments got flagged for it. Seems like it's a few dissenters while others have mentioned concurring with this fact as I also have always been under the impression that work hardware is for work only. And then some people are talking about how it's authoritarian or anti human, like, it's not that deep.

> it's not that deep.

In your view what, if anything, is?

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

#548

Post by reroute22 »

shimman wrote: post #514
reroute22 wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't confuse employees with execs. It's a gigantic company with almost 80k employees. Most cultures around the world are acutely aware that the actions and opinions of their leaders are not a reflection of behaviors and opinions of regular citizen.

Oh come on, these are some of the highest income earning employed workers on the planet and they have constantly shown they are A-okay with working on systems that enable mass misery, have no qualms against profiting off a genocide, are more than happy to give conference talks on how they implement mass surveillance. Sorry but these lot are truly an evil bunch, just blaming the executives is foolish. The executives a…

Execs was indeed more of a metaphorical description.

A small subset of individuals working there.

You don't need 80k people to make policy decisions, Meta is that big not because of policy makers, but because of infrastructure people and people working on all sorts of Meta's attempts to enter other markets to expand their business, markets that have nothing to do with addictive and/or exploitative social networking products.

A president of a country also can't do anything by themselves, they need a small army of supporters in positions of influence. And still the said army is a percent of the total population.

Besides, let's be real here, yes, Meta's is one of the worst in terms of overall impact, e.g. certainly worse than Google out of the big ones, but the difference is not as big as one might imagine.

Meta also powers WhatsApp, which is basically an operating system of the entire region of Southeast Asia and India, and also a large portion of South America, which together host >2.5B people. Loosing that particular part of Meta (if Meta was to fail) would be a big loss to humanity, loss that Western dwellers refuse to know or accept, but ask anyone living in those areas they'll tell you how much of the economic boom of late in those places rides on connectivity provided by WhatsApp.

Google on the other hand owns YouTube, and in my personal anecdotal experience I get a heck of a lot more misery from YouTube and especially Shorts that I can't seem to escape or avoid, than I do from TikTok or Instagram neither of which I use at all and have no issue ensuring 0 interactions with.

Yes, in the end both do both good and bad, and yet in grand total Meta is worse than Google, but A) the difference isn't as large, and B) it's actually a lot harder to tell than it seems if the net result is even negative in the end. It probably is, but it's hard to tell definitively. As in, stating that some parts of Meta's business are better die and the humanity will be better off is undeniably correct, stating that all of it just needs to seize to exist sounds more like a hyperbolical illustration of sentiment, not an objectively sound proposition necessarily.

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

#550

Post by nopointttt »

The thing that gets me is the slope between "we monitor for security" and "we harvest for training data." The first has a clear threat model: here's the data, here's who can access it, here's the retention policy. The second turns the employee into a permanent unpaid contributor to a model they'll never see the weights of. Different economics, even if the capture mechanism is the same. Consent language probably hasn't caught up.
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