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 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, encryption keys, PII, etc. ? Can employees turn this off at their discretion? What happens if someone forgets to turn it off before they cat the companywide ssh root private key? Even setting aside legality, someone with access to this training data would have what sounds like an unacceptably broad level of access to company systems unless Facebook wants to get hacked.

Yeah, this is crazy, remember when engineers were actually engineers and that meant something? Imagine asking to install spyware on your lawyers' firms' company laptops because you didn't trust them not to make some deal with the judge. Or demanding 24 hour monitoring on everything a doctor does because you need to review the footage at any time.

EDIT: While we are here, let's do this for politicians as well :), publicly available, auditable 24-hour surveillance.

>data collected would not be used for performance assessments or any other purpose besides model training

And you expect Meta employees, of all people, to believe this?

It will be interesting to see how the people who maintain (in my opinion) one of the worst offending organizations out there for invading your privacy - and generally treating you in a manner that lacks human decency - respond to having their privacy invaded, and being treated without basic decency.

I realize you can argue whatever is done at work should have no expectation of privacy, and I get that, but as an employer myself I've always felt that schemes like keyboard and mouse tracking are going a chasm too far. Your employees are human beings not robots. In the older context of corporate productivity tracking there are far better metrics available - starting with, I don't know, maybe talking to your employee and asking them how things are going.

I wouldn't have a problem if it were opt-in, but if this were foisted upon me I would surely quit.

I like to imagine they’ll mostly capture meta employees using AIs to do work.

Then they’ll deploy models trained on this, and begin capturing employees using AIs that are good at using AIs to do work.

Repeat a few times and they’ll start capturing the keystrokes from people mashing their heads into keyboards with dispair and exclaiming, “Why can’t these models do anything anymore!!”

Every day I grow more and more glad that I turned down a Meta offer. It was probably a hire-to-fire offer anyway, not based on any engineering prowess on my part. Still, I couldn't be more relieved I dodged that bullet.

Now this is some hacker news.

We’ve been moving towards a more and more tyrannical company controlled society for a long time and now they’re straight up doing hacking tactics to train machines to take our jobs. Doesn’t get much more bleak than that.

Next gen AI is going to become really proficient in scrolling Hacker News.

So, back in 2021, I supervised a student project where we aimed to simulate human interaction with the browser. Obviously, we needed data on human interaction. After discussion, we ruled out collecting data from a group because:

- the project was time constrained, so hardly any time, and

- there were serious ethical questions which could never be addressed well within the allotted time for this project

So we ended up discarding the idea of collecting data from a representative group, even before we got to the point of asking "how do you do handle that ethically". We ended up collecting data from 1 subject. The student in question, indeed. He handled the data from which he derived heuristics that simulated the data. The collected data therefore never left the student's hands.

<sarcasm>Silly us, we should have just not bothered and collected it from anyone and anywhere. Apparently.</sarcasm>

In all seriousness, this callous and complete disregard for ethical questions offends me so very much.

What toxic trash.

I hope this is widely hacked. If these employees are any good, someone will whip up a countermeasure that feeds absurdly wild and nonsensical data into Meta's fetid, gaping maw.

I'm so happy that EU and UK have laws against this kind of thing and so I will still be able to work somewhere in the future(TBD what future means, though).

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".

Original source: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...

Now that the early 10s dev worship era is officially over, all pretensions of "making the world a better place" and being nice have been dropped and devs shall remember what it feels like to be a replaceable cog that can be swapped the way we used to do with phone wallpapers.

A job is something where you exchange Skills and Time for Money. Most self-respecting creators/workers will not agree to trade Skills, Time, Privacy, Self-esteem for Money.

Last time I checked, Facebook is not a thing other than for watching AI generated content, Instagram is still a thing to watch mind-numbing content and get distracted from other problems by doomscrolling.

It’s same as language translators and RLHF annotators doing work to contribute to AI training data. Is Facebook or Instagram solving a problem for humanity that’s worth selling your soul? Won’t a job that can be automated with AI training data of clicks and typing, markdown files, next function prediction with no coherence be significantly worse than a job that requires creativity?

It seems like every tech company is moving towards the sweatshop model pioneered by CrossOver/Trilogy, treating engineers as human CPUs at best, monitored 24/7.

Growing up we learned about _Slaughterhouse 5_ and _Cat's Cradle_ by Kurt Vonnegut. But there's not enough discussion or awareness of _Player Piano_. Incredibly prescient. These kinds of dystopic headlines are exactly the kind of thing you'd see in the book.

For context, when the article says "a list of work-related apps and websites," this includes Google properties like gmail, docs, etc, and social media websites like Facebook and Instagram, with no provision for excluding personal accounts.

Yesterday I was doomscrolling computer vision related stuff on LinkedIn. I hate it, but often looking for freelancing ops in CV. A video appeared in my feed of some South Asian laborers sewing in a garment factory. All of them had cameras mounted on their heads. Otherwise, they looked exactly like you’d imagine beleaguered sweatshop workers would look. Exhausted, dull expressions looking into the camera as whoever was filming the video walked by.

The presentation of the video and all the comments were on awesome cool ego-centric video understanding research that’s going to totally obsolesce human labor. I couldn’t get over how grim the video was. Here are some people in one of the least desirable positions in the world, and that’s not enough. Now they must labor without a shred of dignity, knowing they’re training their own replacements and likely not a thing they can do about it.

I’ve struggled to find enough freelance work to stay busy recently, but more than that I’m starting to feel a moral crisis. It’s getting harder and harder for me to feel like what we’re collectively doing isn’t absolutely fucked.

For those saying that this is fine because company computers are company property...

This is like going to work in a drug-lab where everyone is required to strip naked to ensure no "product" can be smuggled out. It's a zero trust environment at first blush, with the added terror of it being used to replace you with AI.

People working naked in a drug lab have more job security than meta employees and an equivalent level of respect and trust from their employer. However, they can't unionize because they have no legal protections. Their employer could literally point a gun at them if they complained. That isn't the case for Meta employees. Just sayin'.

They have nothing else to do. Someone needs to be able to justify their position by creating stupid changes like this to create a line item on their LinkedIn.

Meanwhile, nobody seems focused on capturing CEO’s data for AI training.

Meta going all in on their brand with this.

Someone had to do it, distasteful though it may be. Could be quite hilarious what it learns in the process.

I bet this doesn't include higher management. Wonder why.

UNIONIZE. If it’s not obvious to you now, it never will be.

  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.                                             
                                                            

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.

Do most people who work in AI companies realize that if this buildup of reasoning models succeeds at what every tech CEO is aiming for, all of them will be out of a job?

As everybody knows, key strokes and mouse movements are the things that solve problems, definitely the data worth capturing for AI training.

If it is available for training, I assume it is available for discovery.

This is one of those interesting “I wonder why” moments in tech. And I’m sure that in five years, this event will be an early symptom of something that will happen.

A cynic would say this has nothing to do with AI since meta owns employee machines anyways and has always been collecting data. Perhaps voluntary attrition > layoffs thinking in action.

But I’m having a lot of trouble envisioning how my keystrokes could actually train something you could use while you’re typing. Latency between keystrokes and seeing things appear would kill my productivity way more than a tool could recapture. Heck, when VS Code fell in love with agent suggestions it took me a week to fix my editor so I could be productive again.

Because ends justify means. To quote Boz himself:

“ The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good. It is perhaps the only area where the metrics do tell the true story as far as we are concerned.”

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.

How is this supposed to improve productivity? I'm still struggling with the framing of the business productivity gained from this?

I will say that I feel for the folks who work at Meta...I can't help but to feel they have long jumped the shark.

0) The odds that any of this massive amount of data is ever used by Meta for anything are very low. Less so that anyone will actually look at it, including lawyers.

1) With vibe coding being so effective, Meta employees have easy ways to poison the data set in <30 min of work.

2) What could they possibly want or create that would justify the bad press and employee disengagement from work devices? Better spam bot detection? They have to have some of the best already.

3) No really, Meta employees have the opportunity to really mess with the data in quite humorous ways without any pushback (see 0)

this would be a good time for Meta employees to reconsider their life choices.

After all the layoffs, labeling people as underperformers while laying off, etc. can they stoop any lower? Why TF would anyone in their right mind would want to join this company?

This is how anthropic captured the code agent so fast. You need training data, users are giving it to you.

Being a terminal application, all interaction is trainable signal (unlike, say, cursor, which is an IDE and let users freely explore, edit the files, move the mouse. Model sees nothing of it, nothing to train upon).

So meta is doing the obvious, we want to train a computer use model, we need training data. Better to capture from employee than buying low quality data.

Wasn't it a few months ago that some engineer leaked that XAI was building 'Human Emulators'. This is either Meta's attempt at the same or just a blatant lie to make sure their engineers aren't slacking off. I've heard the workload has more than doubled for those who weren't laid off which is the only reason I think it might not be a employee monitoring system as I don't think anyone there can afford to not work hard.

And here I am rejecting projects because I refuse to install on my computer closed sourced Chinese VPN my client is requiring, though I told them I could just use built-in Windows VPN or open source Hiddify.

Btw do they at least pay them extra for this spying or is it supposed to be for free? I mean if they paid at least 30-50% on top of the salary maybe I wouldn't mind doing it on dedicated meta computer.

I guess this is why they acquired https://www.limitless.ai/ ?

Training on future vi macros. Just

  kk1Gi// file.js<Esc>M/func<Enter>o    let<Esc>``

So happy I decline to even start the Meta interview cycles. The company seemed ridiculous even back then, but this is next level.

Everybody will be a serf under technofeudalism.

People are just being misused to train their own replacement.

Always thought Meta was a god awful run company and this just brings home the cake

Meta employees it's time to raid the kitchen and head for the exit ASAP. Maybe to team Flock

Probably aren’t seeing the promised productivity improvements of AI in terms of shipping production code and not just “super demos” that aren’t robust. So they want to see if the withers are really putting in the time or if the models struggle past a level of complexity that stalls or reverses early gains.

At this rate they're not going to need to do layoffs.. nobody sane is going to want to work there.

> to improve the company's models in areas where they still struggle, like choosing from dropdown menus and using keyboard shortcuts

Seems like a strange approach in general. I'd have assumed you'd just have it use accessibility features to get at things, if there is no other interface.

When you will think about it, what actually useful data are you getting from this exercise? It is like strapping camera on a manual laborer so you can see what he sees, but you don't get data about the touch and grip and you won't get data about why he is doing specific moves.

Why do we allow this?

Ironically, I’d be surprised if this wasn’t already the case before? I recall vividly employment contracts with meta in 201X with a clear mention that employees were giving up any sense of privacy while using meta provided devices or entering meta’s premises…

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47851242

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47851086

Meta is like Big Brother in the novel 1984 now.

If you then think of crazy companies such as Palantir, something really has to be done about those entities. As a first step I suggest disbanding those companies, for many reasons, including wrong ethics.

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.

Eventually every word spoken as well, which is already the case for most meetings, but not yet for individual interactions. Every bit of information at companies will be accessible to AI. This will allow automation all the way up to the C suite.

I wonder if this screen + mouse + keyboard (+ camera + speaker + mic) interface is really the right level of abstraction to model a “digital entity”

Sure, you can do everything a human can, but it also seems VERY inefficient

As an alternative, maybe you could just do network in/out?

I'm so excited to interview for a career at Meta!

Also, why are the investors not suing the legs off of Zuck for the whole meta verse debacle? It is a scam and pure fraud. Also dumb name, sue for that too. Should have just renamed it meeme.

Seems like Skan AI's solution. They have a few Fortune 500 companies as clients doing exactly the same thing as Meta - capturing keyboard and mouse clicks to ultimately do next level process automation.

I assume meta is doing this to train use computer like capabilities

Taking dystopia aside, without a lot more context I don't quite get how the captured data will be particularly useful to train models for say software engineering. If someone can shed light - thanks!

I can't imagine a more useless dataset to collect, proving that Meta might have reached the peak of the graph of (reach/grasp)/time and the numerator is about to plummet spectacularly.

I wonder if there's a market for a little usb fob that does nothing but meander the mouse cursor about the screen in a path that, upon proper rendering, would appear to be a ...

for the company that is one of the major players in tracking similar data across the web, i don't see much wrong with this.

if they continue to share their work through open releases despite the leadership change, i hope we get to benefit with their work.

not quite optimistic about the result as i wonder if on aggregate we all consistently interact with computers the most efficient way possible. maybe to beat captcha or scraper detection through mimicry perhaps.

This should be made illegal as soon as possible.

This is clearly and obviously the shortest possible path to a total surveillance society.

From company metrics I have found that developers who make a lot of mouse movements correlate with weaker performance reviews. Something to think about.

Could a few of the smart people there please find a way to poison this data set? Before something similar ends up on my work computer.

Relevant story (Manna)

https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

What would be the wxact opposite of Meta as a company? Small, privacy focused, HN blacklisted at work? Am I missing something?

Honest question, does most of Meta's creepiness trickle down directly from Zuckerberg, or is their entire executive also this creepy?

Does the executive know better at this point but have toasted the culture and no one can fight against it anymore?

At some point, this level of data collection becomes toxic to the survival of the company. I'm floored that Legal keeps approving this given the stakes in future lawsuits.

Terminated for under-performance? Subpoena the surveillance data. Get their data scientists in for a deposition to explain the algorithm and schema.

All it takes is one disgruntled employee with deep enough pockets and a large enough axe to grind to turn this training data into nuclear waste that poisons the company top to bottom, but I'm confident nothing will change until that happens, at which point the current crop of leaders will already have their moneybags and have fucked off safely into the sunset.

Maybe this is exactly why Meta poached Alexandr Wang. Data capturing is an heirloom technique passed down from his Scale AI days

https://archive.is/TYcpI

Do they get each own Meta ray ban grasses as well that they have to wear at all time even in bathrooms?

This is....ridiculous. Does Meta also capture it's CEOs movements with such fidelity?

"start"

They 'trust me'. Dumb f*ks.

I definitely see a strong demand for a 11” 1kg macbook with these policies inevitably spreading.

Meta employees to start using AI to make fake mouse movements, keystrokes while goofing off.

If anyone still has not watched Severance, it is good time to start watching that show!

It will be funny when the AI learns to browse Reddit and watch porn during the work day.

The irony of this is so strange..

With this data, meta can make metahumans which pass recaptcha for real.

Can anybody else hear it? the world smallest violin.

If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear? Right?

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.

Microsoft was also doing the same in their VIVA program.

Time to leave tech forever and farm onions, I think.

fines are negligible for these companies, so i also expect these policies to be applied to eu employees without telling them

Meta can even afford to destroy themselves and their own employees.

More proof that they do not care about you at all. This is Meta's way of moving fast and destroying everything at all costs.

Honestly, I doubt this data is as useful as they think.

Half my workday is me browsing random tabs while an AI agent does the actual work. They're going to train a model on alt-tabbing and scrolling HN/Twitter/Reddit.

Gotta feed the beast some how.

Judging through a behavioral scientist lenses, this is pretty exciting.

Don't get me wrong. It is not to applaud here, it is simply fascinating looking through a factual lens here.

And maybe there will be more questions than answers. And I bet this is going to be funny, when there won't be a clear picture in the end. What are high performer, low performer anyway? There are many pieces missing. I for example do a lot of visuals using a notebook with a pencil. To this day I find Miro etc. distracting and for my creativity to distracting. Hand writing is different to typewriting. I am way faster in the last case and associate through everything until I lose track of the main thing. Not with notes on paper. I utilize this fact, don't go for one thing over the other, but bloat is the result of doing everything virtually.

So how would my keystrokes then look like? I don't know. Highly efficient, maybe, but lots and lots of gaps without hitting the keys.

Low performers? I was overlooking over 500 engineers, did over 400 interviews, build departments from the ground up, watched people do work and helping them via inhouse developed tools to work better while having more fun.

So I think in Gauss often times and low performers, a term, I despise, but it is used for simplicity, aren't really doing nothing, in fact they work a lot, it is just the content or method that is so bad.

My best devs but a lot of consideration into architecture and communication - I trained them. They fell key decisions and helped teams get better.

The industrious low performers complained about them, that they rarely are doing "the work" on their PC. Well, well.

So, would I feel comfortable? No. And don't do to others - as the saying goes.

But if there won't be any consequences just data which cannot be tight to a worker, or and if, it can only be used to benefit them, I would happily take part in such a data gathering, because we all do personal optimization and I am curious about what the data "says" vs. subjective feeling.

On the other hand, tracking might be inevitable - hear me out - if these people are working on NDAs etc. Leakage is monitored anyway, make no mistake. So it sounds like closing a gap.

Tough, very tough.

I tend to say no one gets ousted in corporate companies for their mistakes but by their foes. So data is one thing, the one stabbing you another.

how to cause a mass exodus with this one simple trick!

I can’t imagine being mad that the data collection company that I work for now wants data on _me_

Really though it seems reasonable to me. They want data to train AI, and their employees are obviously a large source.

They could already track your every click. They have root on your work MacBook. Most employers do.

There is a danger in this. Small companies with delusional people in them will see "how the big guys do it" and try to apply this kind of thing in their own little fart of a business, making our dev/engineer lives miserable.

Another alt link: https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-new-ai-tool-tracks-staf...

By all means, they have the right to do so, since those are their assets. For what it's worth, it will give them a good dataset for their agent to improve integration with the browser and operating system.

Martin Niemöller's "First They Came" fits perfectly and it shows how hypocritical it is to approach the subject of ai training only when it applies to you. What a Wonderful World!

Normalizing this shit is more evil than anything too. Really classy overlords strikes again.

The engineers who implement this should be ashamed of themselves.

‘Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said the data collected would not be used for performance assessments or any other purpose’

Horseshit.

1. Employees are being asked to train AI to replace them.

2. Performance assessments will 100% be impacted. No question.

Thinking back on the OTT interview experience that Facebook helped pioneer, imagine making it through that, getting paid a massive sum of money BUT barely getting by on it because of the location, then they drop this crap on you?

Big Brother is always watching.

I mean - uh - gotta find all the signals that may exist.

I...admire the diligence

1984 level sickening.

Hey fellow engineers.

I know you've long been hypnotized by libertarianism and the cult of the individual.

Maybe it's time you reconsider in light of the overwhelming evidence that the capitalist class is, in fact, not your friend.

The only known way for workers to assert their rights is collective action. Alone, you are weak and replacable. Together, we are strong.

It's time for a proper tech worker's union, to give us some fangs to claw back our dignity with.

Meta should go and pound sand.

Capitalist tech bros have lost their marbles at this point.

Fucking insane.

Optimizing ourselves to death.

Capitalism is asleep at the wheel with its foot stuck on the gas pedal.

Zuck's a sociopath

> Meta (META.O), opens new tab is installing new tracking software on U.S.-based employees’ computers to capture mouse movements, clicks and keystrokes for use in training its artificial-intelligence models, part of a broad initiative to build AI agents that can perform work tasks autonomously, the company told staffers in internal memos seen by Reuters.

> The tool will run on a list of work-related apps and websites and will also take occasional snapshots of the content on employees’ screens for context, according to one memo, posted by a staff AI research scientist on Tuesday in a dedicated internal channel for the company's model-building Meta SuperIntelligence Labs team.

ALL YOUR DATA IS BELONG TO US

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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As everybody knows, key strokes and mouse movements are the things that solve problems, definitely the data worth capturing for AI training.

Data collection isn’t new. The training is.

But this is a good thing. Let me explain. Imagine a society where an individual’s rights are prioritised and where society is dedicated to the best interests of each citizen (not desires or wants but reasonable considered best interests)

Now imagine a society where your individual daily actions are recorded, reviewed and helpfully advised upon.

Millions of people making millions of actions each day and all recorded compared and sifted for positive feedback and improvement overall.

Just how far ahead would such a society pull compared to one that stays at today’s level. Compared to one that used totalitarian methods enabled by such surveillance?

The difference between Soviet and Western Europe was not the tech, it was the trust.

If we can build a society with f trust then this tech will turbo charge us.

If …