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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 rolling out with this as a focus

Companies have shown us that IP going to AI providers is acceptable. Once you cross that line your thought workers are assets not people.

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.

My ex-employer (non-FANGA, but still over $10b mkt cap) started using similar software.

This is a naive take on this. Do you think it stops with just metamates(lmao that’s what they call themselves) being surveilled? Nope. This is the exact type of thing that software IC’s should reject in solidarity. Being happy with BadCompanyX trampling employee expectations directly allows for GoodCompanyY to enact the same policies.

No. It would be best if it included the higher-ups too. I think we all just assume that the c-suite, and anyone who might talk to the legal department, are exempted. And HR (medical info). Or maybe meta is just that stupid that they havent.

There are large organizations at Meta focused on basic research & design (FAIR, Open Compute, PyTorch, etc) and giving back to the community. Not everyone is maximizing revenue.

This actually came up with multiple companies I worked at in Sweden. Apparently the law here is quite strict that you _can_ use your computer for personal matters and that your employer is not allowed to spy on you on those matters.

So they can monitor your email and slack server-side, but not your client-side stuff that doesn't touch their servers. However if you use a VPN then they can also monitor your DNS requests and every website you visit. Any kind of client-side telemetry is limited to a few things, however those things can involve what applications you have installed (like spotify) for security reasons or USB sticks plugged in.

This may be legally challenging if you’re not allowed to communicate company internal information and especially files outside of company hardware.

> Yes they could have accessed logs before but there’s a difference between directed checking after incidents and active surveillance at scale.

at this point employees should be kept in cold storage to acclimate so as to prevent being shocked from any more chilling announcements. also will cut down on bathroom breaks

> A handful of engineers were let go as the result of a re-alignment, and their AI counterparts are actively maintaining their code.

Feel like I'm reading a Gibson novel here.

There shouldn't be any expectation of privacy? There absolutely should!

> Tbh that's to be expected, the work machine is the company's property and there shouldn't be any expectation of privacy.

> I work at a tech firm in India

First I wondered how can you have such a low expectation on privacy, then you answered my question. What you need in India is more unionization and fight against corruption. It is becoming worse here in Europe but in India you do not have the protections that we have. Without that you will have no rights.

You will have to fights to get rights at your job. In the same way that Europeans are going to have to fight to keep them.

> the work machine is the company's property and there shouldn't be any expectation of privacy.

A bogus argument, methinks. Consider that the company also owns the phones, but can or do they listen to every phone call ?

Strong disagree (especially under US law). Consider what this means for union organizing in the context of this 2022 NLRB memo.

> Under settled Board law, numerous practices employers may engage in using new surveillance and management technologies are already unlawful. In cases involving employer observation of open protected concerted activity and public union activity like picketing or handbilling, the Board has recognized that “pictorial recordkeeping tends to create fear among employees of future reprisals.”10 The Board accordingly balances an employer’s justification for surveillance “against the tendency of that conduct to interfere with employees’ right to engage in concerted activity.”11 In that context, “the Board has long held that absent proper justification, the photographing of employees engaged in protected concerted activities violates the Act because it has a tendency to intimidate.”12

https://www.nlrb.gov/news-outreach/news-story/nlrb-general-c...

We had the AI = Actually Indians meme, now we have Actually Indians = AI. The loop has been completed!

> A handful of engineers were let go as the result of a re-alignment, and their AI counterparts are actively maintaining their code.

I know you’re in India, but in the US, could this not be considered intellectual property theft on “right of publicity”? Your persona and working style is one of your core values you bring to market; building a simulacrum of that is not something I expect to be part of the “your output is the company’s IP” in an existing contract.

I will give a company the right to try to reproduce my output. But my very likeness and modus operandi? No.

Wait so the engineers doing novel work are ousted; you fire the engineer that had the skill set to produce the work in the first place? Surely this is creating a Stasi-like neighbour snitching environment with chilling effect where the better you do the faster you become a target for replacement by engineer's incentivized to win points by replacing you. Even being very charitable where the scenario is the code was so poor that the code the employee is working on is so entrenched in domain knowledge they've become a huge bus factor, an LLM is going to make that kind of code worse. I'm struggling to imagine the subset of people this replaces that is not a long term detriment to everyone working there. Those people became "key personnel" for a reason no?

Well, no, there should be an expectation of privacy; an employer shouldn't just be able to have a palantír for their employees.

>I work at a tech firm in India, and we are encouraged to create skills.md based on the traits of our colleagues, with the intention of reducing key personnel risk. A handful of engineers were let go as the result of a re-alignment, and their AI counterparts are actively maintaining their code.

Okay, now this sounds like satire. But I suppose that's the way the world is going.

Tbh that's to be expected, the work machine is the company's property and there shouldn't be any expectation of privacy.

There remains a thing called human dignity.

If a company can't trust the people it hires, that's a fault in the hiring process, not the employees.

Just speculating, but the intention wasn't reducing key personnel risk. It was so that your employer could fire them and replace them with an agent running off of their associated skills.md.

skills.md heh they serialized you into a config file and used it to boot your replacement. could've at least picked a better extension.

>we are encouraged to create skills.md based on the traits of our colleagues

Like that "Scott is an asswipe who never agrees to any idea that isn't his" or what?

a bathroom stall is also a company property. Does the note about not expecting privacy extend there too?

>A handful of engineers were let go as the result of a re-alignment, and their AI counterparts are actively maintaining their code.

This is exactly what they're doing, and they aren't the only ones.

I insulted him in my mandatory Exit Interview form from HR when I resigned.

It had no impact of recruiters trying to win me back since then.

He's already got the willing-intern-finder.md skill locked and loaded

All enterprise messaging apps support exporting your DMs today, for legal compliance.

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.

Any fallout or monetary changes you could sue for, a company like Meta can probably pay for and still turn their huge profits. It seems like these companies do little to hide their shady actions at all.

Would require a government willing to hold criminals accountable even after taking bribery into account.

In most developed countries, dissent in the workplace is protected by labor laws.

It's absolutely wild to me that anyone has ever operated under any other assumption.

Maybe because they're aware that complaining about the boss is protected by law (in the United States and many other countries).

While you have the right practical approach, I do believe companies should face harsh regulations preventing this kind of monitoring. It has almost universally negative effects, from enabling union-busting to exploitation to all kinds of discrimination and favoritism.

It's absolutely their right, but it's a dramatic cultural departure from the history of the company.

In the late 2010s/pre-covid it was very common for employees to port their personal cell phone number to their work phone and just not have a personal cell phone. The internal culture at the company was remarkably open for their size.

That all went away by the time I left in 2022, and from what I've heard it has only accelerated into an employee-hostile environment. I'm not shocked at this move.

Engineers build tools for other people. The profession exists in support of human life. We make the substrate that civilization runs on.

If humans are the point, this also goes for keeping work environments humane.

> When I joined the workforce a long time ago, I went in with the mindset that: Their property, their equipment, their right to monitor (or even keylog).

Why do you renounce to your rights to privacy so easily? You are an employee not a slave, sometimes I have the feeling that Americans do not know the difference.

> If you want to rant about the company, do it outside the company!

You have a right to organize inside the company, and for that the most efficient easy way are the internal company communications. Communications with the purpose of unionizing should be private and the company accessing them should be punished, and if needed C level should go to prison for their crimes.

How do you organize otherwise? How do you contact your colleagues about grievances about the company?

It is mind blowing to see this capitulation on personal rights. It seems that corporate rights are more important than anything else in the USA. It is a pure dystopia.

1. But they are not paying for your training which you are bringing to the company. 2. About ranting about company, it is difficult to organize. That's why unions existed, and that's why unions were allowed to meet in work hours.

I cannot understand how can anyone hold such outrageously antihuman beliefs.

Governments, corporations and any other organizations should all exist FOR the people, not the other way around.

American-style capitalism truly is a disease.

There is no clean separation between personal and work. It is also more efficient to blend them (if I expect a baseline level of non-snoopiness on my work computer, I will text my boyfriend from my work laptop... obviously beneficial for the firm).

Either way when it comes to ranting about the company: many workplaces don't have a watercooler where all your team mates congregate (e.g. remote/different offices). Also what, you'll rant about confidential work projects over non-work texts?

>Why do people expect to have a right to do non-work related stuff on the job?

Like use the restroom? Personally, I'm not a slave. I am getting more and more used to the idea of having to push back on those who do exhibit such a mentality. Y'all are beginning to become a threat to the rest of us.

This comments pairs really well with the song Sixteen Tons - I cued the song[1] and re-read your comment.

More substantively: I would like the employer/employee transaction to be one of buing/selling labor. To me, training AI on keystrokes nudges the deal towards selling one's "soul" next to other dystopian tropes like brain implants and work toilets that analyze excretions.

You are correct that employers own the laptops and can install anything they want, which is why I never do anything other than work there - the farthest I will go is participate in employer-hosted shitpost groups/channels, which are not anonymous, and they are free to train their models on that.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1980WfKC0o

You come with a belief, then you wonder why other people don't have the belief. The belief was exogenous for you. Why do you believe the belief is not exogenous for others?

I guess you never talk to coworkers about your weekend. That's on the job. I see you mention the water cooler; how dare you talk there?

You would love the world of Severance! Drop your humanity and individuality at the door. Become a mindless drone

Companies pay their employees to build things. They do not pay their employees for their likeliness or the inner workings of their brains. Meta is trying to get the latter by keystroke tracking. It is an overreach in that context.

If they just want to monitor your computer for the purposes of productivity tracking, that is in their right, imo - just a shitty thing to do.

I don’t care if a company monitors which websites I go to on a work computer, what applications I run or what I say on Slack.

On the other hand I would be looking for another job if they had keyloggers or were taking screenshots even if they said anything about me shopping on Amazon or randomly browsing Hacker News or any website that wasn’t gaming or Netflix during work hours.

Heck I use to travel a lot more for business and I used my work laptop for Netflix and other streaming services in the hotel.

As long as I’m meeting performance standards it shouldn’t matter.

What a pathetic quisling attitude to life.

I understand the security spyware, though I think it's somewhat questionable there. But this sounds like deliberately putting all of your most sensitive data in a blender and then inevitably letting anyone get a taste of the smoothie.

It doesn't have to get leaked. They can sell it and use it as another means to identify Internet users. Meta is pretty infamous for identifying, tracking, and understanding user behavior. We are kind of past the point where these companies care at all. If you think the push to add age verification to operating systems is an unrelated giggle I envy you. Something something Cambridge analytica.

> Politicians will be the first to carve out exceptions for themselves for reasons of "security" while everyone else is surveilled.

Well good thing we can just not vote for anyone and/or remove anyone who tries to take this stance. It's not like they are appointed by God.

This is why a worker's rights movement is important. You shouldn't have to rely on your employer's goodwill. Reasonable privacy rights on work equipment should be guaranteed by law, and any large company should have a Euro-style worker's council.

The legal environment is the only way to baseline behavior. In countries with strong worker's rights, you generally don't have to fight much to make use of them; it's the norm for management, too. Likewise, the US-style norm of having no expectations toward your employer and the "stay in your lane" type takes rampant in the thread are also symptoms of the environment and its norms.

Can add any detail to "sell you out"? Was it explicit violation of expected privacy of the conversation?

How do you mean? They violated attorney-client privelege?

Are they merging with Palantir any time soon?

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.

White collar firms with a reputation for paying well don’t cheap out on severance. It’s a cheap way to get employees to sign some stuff reducing the risk of lawsuits, plus their unemployment insurance premiums stay lower.

It’s only once the business is having a cash crunch or will no longer need to hire competitive candidates that they start letting people go without severance.

Doesn't this assume that what humans are current doing with LLM agents is working out? Isn't it a bit early to bet on that to this degree?

In this economy?

Dog fighting is a type of blood sport that turns game and fighting dogs against each other in a physical fight, often to the death, for the purposes of gambling or entertainment to the spectators.[1] In rural areas, fights are often staged in barns or outdoor pits; in urban areas, fights are often staged in garages, basements, warehouses, alleyways, abandoned buildings, neighborhood playgrounds, or in the streets.[2][3] Dog fights usually last until one dog is declared a winner, which occurs when one dog fails to scratch, dies, or jumps out of the pit.[4] Sometimes dog fights end without declaring a winner; for instance, the dog's owner may call off the fight.[4]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_fighting

Meta forces employees to use personal Facebook accounts at work.

Yes, but, so what? It isn't a license to train AI on employee personal information.

That said -- social media websites were later removed from the "work-related" list. So there was at least some recognition it was overreach and did not match the stated justification.

Yeah automatically assume everything on your work computer is available for your employer to see. And everything you do on your own device when connected to their WiFi or VPN.

I’m surprised this needs to be said out loud.

on your phone not connected to corp wifi

And Ideally not connected to company WiFi

>You know you are at work and monitored.

unless you're in a jurisdiction that has anti-surveillance workplace laws, which if you don't should probably think about before Mark Zuckerberg gets the idea to monitor to your body temperature from below the waistline

It would be really embarrassing if this is what it takes to come to that realization rather than the same way the rest of the world does.

That's really only limited to political appointees as far as the US government is concerned. Career civil servants hang around for a long time while their bosses change every 4 to 8 years.

I’m just saying that they’ve been collecting this info for years. Keyloggers, etc. are on all the computers you’re given. Employees didn’t have any expectation of privacy - just a hope. Now, it’s clear it’s completely gone and so the hope and goodwill is gone.