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I was once asked to install surveillance software on my personal PC, as a remote freelance worker. The person responsible on Slack told me "let me know when you've installed it". So I decided to just wait 15 minutes and then say "yeah I installed it" to see if they would notice that I didn't... and they didn't, they just said "OK, thanks" and I never heard anything about it ever again.
I realize this doesn't really help this conversation but that's all I can think of whenever this kind of subject comes up.
I've had the IT department complain that the phone monitoring software wasn't reporting back to them, gave me instructions to fix it, and when I told them that the instructions point to things that don't exist in the app, they never replied back to me. I presume that my work phone is still not pinging them.
Makes sense. The dude probably didn't care about the software. He was just trying to check an item off of his task list for the day.
This article is just a summary of other articles. Specifically these two more detailed ones:
https://www.itnews.com.au/news/meta-to-start-capturing-emplo...
https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-new-ai-tool-tracks-staf...
> "This makes me super uncomfortable. How do we opt out?" was the top-rated comment in response to the internal announcement, according to a post on Meta's internal workplace communications site seen by Business Insider."
Have people lost their spine? seriously, quit your job. this is insane. why are americans putting up with this bullshit?
Read Careless People. The fish rots from the head
None of those employees can claim ignorance as to who they work for. They made their bed, now they can lie in it.
I gotta say, the opening line is a gem of British humour:
> Meta, the company built on watching everything its billions of users do online so it can keep them clicking on ragebait and targeted ads
Surveillance for thee, not for me
Surveillance for all
The Zuckerberg quote from the article reads like someone running for class president in high school.
> helps you achieve your goals, create what you want to see in the world, experience any adventure, be a better friend to those you care about, and grow to become the person you aspire to be.
… If you vote for me, all of your wildest dreams will come true. Thank you.
vote for pedro
I don't see what can be trained with that, but it would be a nightmare to be always recorded like that
You could use this to train an AI to behave like a Meta-employee. Meta seems to like the behavior of Meta-employees, or it wouldn't have hired so many. It would just prefer to have more of this behavior for less, so they'll try to use clankers instead of employees to produce the key strokes and mouse clicks.
Do people honestly believe their current employers aren’t monitoring them right now?
Every employment contract I’ve signed has included language that makes it clear that whatever I do on corporate time, on the corporate net, on corporate devices, is corporate property. This is why I never mix corp and personal data on my phone or join my phone to their WiFi.
Is it just the AI training angle that makes this newsworthy?
Probably to detect all variations of dangerous words such as "union", "genocide" and "peace".
So what happens when this keylogger captures the password that gives access to all the personal data Facebook scraped over the years?
Man, I sure wonder if those engineers building Palantir's, Flock's, and other surveillance SW right now (hello if you're reading this), will have this 20/20 hindsight "oh shit" epiphany moment, when the product they helped build is gonna be used against them or their kids in the future. Kind of like when Dr. Frankenstein finds his end at the hands of his creation.
Those SW devs probably think that doing a deal with the devil in exchange for a higher than average income now, will allow them to build an upper class lifestyle where they'll be safe from the government's jackboots, but news flash, NO you won't, unless you're part of the insider-trading presidential Epstein Island elite pedo-class, you're also on the menu.
Zuckerberg, Gates, Karp, Thiel, all have self sustaining doomsday bunkers on private islands, to escape the societal fallout of their actions. Do you?
I guess these individuals think like "if I don't do this someone else will, and we'll end up in the same situation - except I'll have fewer millions - so I might as well choose the lesser of two evils".
Some people may have refused to do these things - you just aren't aware of them. It's unrealistic though to think that in a globalized world, individuals would share the same ethics and/or intelligence.
Mostly, the motivation of people making these products are doing so because they believe that if they don't do it, then the "bad guys" will keep winning: terrorists, burglars and whatever boogieman is the current "Public Enemy Number One".
> ... unless you're part of the insider-trading presidential Epstein Island elite pedo-class, you're also not safe from government overreach
But how did that turn out for Ghislaine Maxwell though? We aren't seeing her much in the posh NYC parties anymore are we?
And something also has to be said about public shame when sentences like: "Bill Gates got even more STDs than Windows got viruses and that lead to his wife quitting him".
I'd rather be a small millionaire than a billionaire having to suffer headlines like that.
Meta employees shocked to find out they work for Meta.
As much as everyone is rightly dunking on meta employees, it's an interesting slice of the population. Anyone who cared about surveillance and privacy (and addiction, and societal health, etc.) wouldn't be working for meta in the first place. The hypocrisy point is correct to point out, but I do wonder why this is a bridge too far for them.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" -- Upton Sinclair
More discussion on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47860961
And Related:
Meta to start capturing employee mouse movements, keystrokes for AI training
In the actual article (not the headline) there is no mention of staff reporting to be unhappy.
Quotes from unhappy staff are in the Business Insider article which the article links to in its third paragraph.
The actual irony is that this very title is the ragebait, as they say in the article:
> .. so it can keep them clicking on ragebait ..
Full title prefixed "Magnificent"
s/Irony/Schadenfreude/g
Not unhappy enough to leave though.
gonna cry
Fam, what should we actually do about this?
If you want to be real for a minute, we all lived through the freedom of Covid WFH. We all did dishes and billed for it. We all told ourselves 'I needed a break, it helps me think about the problem'. (And that was true, one day I was stuck on an 8 queens problem and I ran a half marathon, when I finished I had the solution)
But... common everyone... we are humans. We take the path of least resistance.
Does anyone waste money or time on things that dont matter intentionally? If I'm making 200k a year with 0 output, I'll probably work on something else in the meantime.
If I'm in office, I don't think I need surveillance, I'm on the clock and its my manager's job to supervise. WFH? I get it.
This idea is as old as the panopticon, and Michel Foucault talks about this as well.
As I get older and run my own company, I find my juniors and seniors need to be supervised. My mid-levels are fine. Juniors dont know when to ask for help. Seniors are complacent. Mid-levels seem to have something to prove.
Can labor make a deal with management? I'll give you WFH for surveillance software.
> the freedom of Covid WFH
That's an interesting phrase. Yes, working from home comes with more freedom over your day than working in an office. During the pandemic, though, it was largely forced as we were told you can't go to the office, or the beach, or the gym, etc. That wasn't really freedom as much as a house arrest sentence.
The key here, though, is that Meta is at least claiming to be doing this to train AI not to spy on how efficient or compliant their WFH employees are.
Monitor output. No need for surveillance.
Surveillance = lack of trust and poor understanding of what counts as productivity. Essentially it's a great indicator of poor management.
> its my manager's job to supervise
No it isn’t. The fault with your logic is that you assume people work because they’re supervised.
> We all did dishes and billed for it.
I don't think intellectual work is an always on hands on keyboard task. When in the office there's plenty of extended water cooler conversations or non work related conversations at work stations. Indeed I've often seen these cited as reasons for RTO.
I agree. In fact, even ensuring the employee is at the work station moving the mouse and pressing the keys is failing to measure their productive engagement at work. How do you know they are cogitating to the company’s benefit at all times? Many employees may rationalize time theft as “taking a second of mental rest” but it’s a breach of their employment contract, and potentially criminal embezzlement, all the same.
In the future, hopefully we can use Neuralink-like technology to quantify worker compliance and cut the wasteful sludge that want to “rest and vest” at the expense of the honest and hard working executives.
Set your seniors to dedicate one day a week to train your juniors. Let them make topic specific schedules for inhouse training days and have those topics/schedules revised/supervised by on of the other seniors. Limit the topics to themes that improve the goals of your company. Challenge both sections of your workforce by watching how the learned stuff is implemented. Do that for a year then re-shuffle personnel and start over.
This is only a proposition if you can afford 1 day/week financially.
Edit: goes without saying, maybe, but make participation mandatory.
If you feel the need to babysit your employees you probably need new employees.
Why are your seniors not unblocking your juniors? And if your seniors are complacent maybe they just need a good challenge.
Supervised != surveilled
No human should be surveilled on work. And if you're going to have surveillance on me, then I want surveillance on you. Would you be fine with that?
I really don't like the conflation of all meta staff with the strategy of the massive multinational corpo-monster that is meta itself. Its very easy to suggest that someone should leave their job on ideological grounds when its someone else you've never met. I don't work at meta, I work at a large non-tech company.
I've been seeing it more and more these days. People do it for programmers as a whole too, or scientists. Concerns about job market layoffs due to ai dismissed with "Programmers surprised as leopards eat their own face" as though dave who does the database at your local high school is responsible in even some small sense for the effects of AI in society.
There are actual people responsible for these problems. People who are not programmers. Who have far less in common with you or me than we both do with some random backend engineer at meta.
Dave working at meta is indeed in part responsible for meta doings. Yes leaving has a cost. That’s the whole point. Meta actions also have associated costs, it is just externalized and doesn’t impact Dave directly
> I really don't like the conflation of all meta staff with the strategy of the massive multinational corpo-monster that is meta itself.
We can separate it out. The things at Meta that had no staff working on them can be blamed on the corporation, and the rest can be blamed on the people working to enable it.
> Who have far less in common with you or me than we both do with some random backend engineer at meta
Half the people on HN want to be the billionaires who are chummy with Zuck, Musk, etc
Temporarily embarrassed millionaires are one thing, but the last 15 years has shown that many American tech workers can get a small slice of the enourmous wealth.
When you've got $10m in assets, even if they return just 1% you are still getting more money than the average worker, at $100k a year.
However someone with $10b in assets is so far beyond you it's crazy. At 1% they are growing at $270k a day.
Actual growth is more like 10% than 1%. The wealthy make millions a day, and still want more. You can't spend that much no matter how much your gluttonous lifestyle is, not without significantly trampling on others.
Millionaires aren't like that, they're just free from financial concerns.
If you work there, you are part of the problem, there is no excuse for that.
Nobody is forcing you to work there.