The company sent a memo to all U.S. based employees that tracking software which will record mouse movements, keystrokes, clicks, and screenshots, will be installed on employee computers. All of that will be used to train AI models to learn how people interact with their computers. Workers will not be able to opt out. This is not global (yet) due to different labor laws (something like this would not fly in most European countries), but that hasn’t stopped the company before when it comes to any sort of privacy.
The software is known as MCI or Model Capability Initiative, and is the exact type of surveillance style system that someone like Zuckerberg and his CTO would think of and be fine with. Sure, companies are free to establish such systems and their governing policies so long as it within the law (U.S. Federal law has no provisions for limiting this, though individual states may have specific statutes). Many corporate executives do consider employees as property (sound familiar? they simply view frontline workers as corporate slaves).
But it also leads to issues of trust and can affect employee morale (because it does have this underlying tone of being constantly surveilled). Plus it being mandatory (no way to opt out), implies that this is a condition to being employed by the company in the U.S. Sorry, but knowing the sort of people Zuckerberg and his CTO are, I would not sell my soul to them (i.e. work for Meta) for ANY amount of money.
While Meta said safeguards and that this data will not be used for any purpose beyond AI training, I have a bridge to sell anyone who believes this. Such a system can be abused for performance related purposes. Additionally, employees know very well this data is training the AI models and the systems they will be used for, to eventually replace them since the key goal behind the data collection is to train AI agents capable of performing white-collar computer tasks autonomously. Additionally, the companies latest round of layoffs are due to AI.
I guess Zuckerberg and Bosworth are being transparent about that aspect. But this is just another data point as to WHY I despise this company, its platforms, and the c-suite.
