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.
Couldn't have happened to a more deserving group of people. My irony detector is sparking so badly I think it's about to blow.
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.
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 you can’t be sanctioned for this usage.
I don't think we have sweeping regulations about it, at least in California.
Most companies I've worked at have a policy of some "reasonable personal use" being permitted. The concern is usually focused on the other way around: Companies do not want their IP on your personal machines.
They can certainly look at whatever is on their own machines, however, regardless if it is your personal data or not.
One large caveat: If you do any work on your company's equipment, they may possibly own it, no matter how relevant it is to the company. It's one of the legal tests used to judge the ownership of your work.
Stuff like this is why France has a ceiling on the market cap of GenAI companies it produces. Imagine if Huggingface/Mistral could fully operate in a low-regulation environment.
Enjoy your red tape frogs. "Live to work" anglo protestant work ethic followers will complete the necessary economic destruction of rude "work to live" cheese eating surrender monkeys.
This is our payback for Charles de Gaulle, Foucault, and Jacques Lacan (it's hard to rank these three based on damage done to western society)
Same in Germany, although the employer can forbid this but needs to do this explicitly. Most employers don't forbid personal data on work machines or using your work email for personal things.
I mean, even if there’s no law to handle this it’s a pretty shitty thing to do, don’t you think?
Only because you live in a rigged economic system.
Already 10 years ago, I got an email from a webshop I used to use once, informing me they were closing down. They'd happily sell the customer database to me, if I were interested. Mind you, they were so desperate that they made this offer to all their customers. Its anecdotal, and only tangentially related. But my point is, companies blatantly selling your data isn't exactly a new thing, and not really AI related either. They are doing this since a long time, but usually got less publicity.
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.
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.
I'm happy to see the metamates (lol) receiving the same pain they inflict on others. Maybe it will teach them a lesson in solidarity.
You can't have solidarity about a bad thing with the people who are doing the bad thing! They have to stop doing the bad thing first! That's how solidarity works!
Don't expect any solidarity to come from such people, they literally sold out humanity for slightly higher salaries. They made their beds, least they can do is feel bad.
> metamates
It was metaapes, iirc.
> This is the exact type of thing that software IC’s should reject in solidarity.
Yes. Which includes quitting, en masse, from any company that does this.
Meta ought to find it impossible to employ anyone with a policy like this.
Maybe in 2010 or 2015, but in 2026? Nobody is quitting their high paying job when the job market is this rough. A bubble has burst and there just are not the tech jobs out there that there used to be.
And employers know this, so they are enacting all kinds of draconian policies because they know employees know that they can't just leave the job and also keep their families fed.
job market is 2019 levels this rhetoric is nice, but doesn't stack up. yes it's not 2021 levels which is where they over hired and hired a bunch of people they would not have hired before then.
This really depends on where you are. In the Bay Area it may be 2019 levels, in other parts of the country it is way worse than 2019.
The tech job market was about 2019 levels a year ago. It's materially worse now.
We are at 2001 dot-com bubble burst levels now, as far as I'm concerned.
If only there was some way where workers in this profession could form some type of JOIN(but like a vertical version?) between different sets of workers, even crossing company boundaries, so that workers could coordinate to ensure that everyone would be quitting at once, and therefore have any power at all to block anti-worker edicts.
So, like an intersection of workers?
My ex-employer (non-FANGA, but still over $10b mkt cap) started using similar software.
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.
There are also large organizations at Meta focussed on the optimal distribution of scam ads to the elderly.
https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...
I guess Palantir is cool as long as they keep the queer interest group going
Like all of us these people make a cost-benefit analysis when it comes to their choice of employer and how much it suits their purposes and personal priorities like giving back to the community.
This is just another factor they’ll have to grapple with in their analysis.
I’m sure some of them will find it a bridge too far but not enough to really matter. The work will continue as will the expansion of Meta and the negative externalities that it produces.
I already assume that on a work computer everything I'm doing could be monitored by work IT. At every job I've had, I've made a point of not using work hardware for anything I even remotely thought someone at the job might object to. Instead I use my own hardware for that kind of thing - I own a smartphone, I own multiple computers, this is not hard to do.
When I worked at a startup that had some internal conflict between the software engineers and management, someone made a Signal group to chat about the issues among the software engineers privately and everyone joined that group with their own Signal accounts, without any kind of issue.
> Yes they could have accessed logs before but there’s a difference between directed checking after incidents and active surveillance at scale.
Not really from the perspective of my own risk/reward calculation. I don't know in advance what's going to be considered an "incident" that will make corporate IT suddenly want to search my work computer. Better to simply have a policy of never using a computer my work controls for personal data, especially when I already have my own computers for that that I use regardless of what job I happen to be working at.
Keep in mind this isn't just about personal data on work hardware. It also leads to things like "we noticed you didn't move your mouse or type anything for 45 minutes, what were you doing?" type of micromanagement.
Yes, but I cannot imagine Meta cares about chilling their employees. They're deep into the "extract more value" phase and are no longer bringing in the cutting edge talent.
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
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, 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.
I wonder if this is where they are going.
> 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.
> 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.
Hint: it’s also fiction
I wish. Check out colleagues.ai as the Chinese equivalent of the programme.
If that actually replaces your coworker, I feel sorry for everyone.
There shouldn't be any expectation of privacy? There absolutely should!
Whether they should or shouldn't, you have to expect that your company has root on your work device or at least some sort of corporate admin profile that gives them access to everything on the device and all attached peripherals. This has been pretty standard at IT / tech companies for as long as I've been in the workforce. I personally wouldn't do anything personal on a work computer, from sending personal E-mails all the way up to storing nudes on it. Why do that when a separate personal computer is cheap and solves the problem entirely?
EDIT: I remember, an example of this actually came up a while ago on HN. An Apple employee had to return a device unwiped, due to legal discovery, but the device had intimate pictures on it[1]. Oops! Don't do that, people.
On a work computer? No there shouldn't and isn't.
This is Stockholm syndrome. Sure, you can enforce zero privacy on work computers, it will just lead to shitty work culture and lowered productivity.
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> employee communications are already monitored everywhere
proof?
> Turns out people actually don't really care about privacy at work
lol, won't ask for proof, because it's trivially falsifiable
Ask your IT department what they're tracking and they'll tell you. And yet I assume you still continue to go to work or do not actively seek out non-surveiling companies. By "everybody," maybe iI should clarify that it’s "majority" instead.
What if "the IT department" is just this one guy who asks me to Cc him an invoice when I buy a laptop and that's the end of it?
(yes that's a real story from my career, and the company was 100+ employees at the time)
That's fine but realize you are not representative of the average tech worker or indeed any white collar worker such as those we are talking about in this post.
As an old hand that's managed many people, I can tell you this is true.
Why not? How about a company-owned toilet? It's their property as well.
You're right, maybe they should put cameras in there too. But there's a reason we don't yet every worker still explicitly or implicitly knows not to use their work computer for personal tasks, as people can and do get fired for doing so.
This is a ridiculous statement. Everyone I know at my company uses work laptops for personal stuff. It's not in the land of freedom though, so great leaders like yourself can't fire people at will.
TBH at this point I don't believe you are a real person.
I stopped doing any personal stuff on a work laptop long time ago, like 10+ years ago. There is absolutely nothing on my work laptop which is not work related. Working from home though helps, I always have my laptop next to me. Same with the phone, under no circumstances I will do anything work related on my personal phone (and yes I do have a company provided phone with MDM and etc).
Consider, do they ever go on explicit websites on that computer? No? Because they know that's surveiled while a personal computer for the same purpose is not. As I said, people do know the difference and might do light personal things like googling something unrelated to work but wouldn't do e.g. banking on a work computer. If they do, well, it'll be their fault if they ever get fired for doing so.
The fact that you don't believe people who don't share your same opinion on mixing work and personal stuff are somehow not "real" is part of the problem.
The semi-official policy of my employer in Denmark is you can watch porn on a work computer, so long as you're paying for it. (This reduces the risk of malware etc.)
I say semi-official because someone asked the question at a Q&A training thing with IT, and that was the IT manager's response.
You can see the EU's guide here: https://www.edps.europa.eu/data-protection/data-protection/r...
> Limited private use of these tools is often permitted, generating a level of expectation by employees for privacy: employers should not routinely read employee' emails or check what they are looking at on the internet.
Most companies just don't have a reason to look through the computer they're letting you use to do your job. Don't give them a reason.
Maximizing shareholder value by observing you doing job in the pursuit of replacing you with a very small shell script is a great reason that they've just discovered.
Get your own laptop, pay for your own cellphone, use your own internet service, etc. If you create anything of value on their property or with their property or during times they're paying you in any capacity, expect them to use it for profit.
Exactly, no one is stopping one from using their personal devices for any personal purpose, and the fact that somehow people are defending wanting to do personal things on a work laptop is utterly baffling to me. Like another commenter said, I always grew up with the notion, legal and social, that a company laptop is absolutely not your property and companies can and will look through it. Use your own devices for your own tasks.
People get fired for banking on a work computer? Whaaat, no way
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I'm not American or in America, but I wouldn't use a work laptop for anything personal.
I mean I have my own laptop and phone, why would I use a work device for that stuff?
> I mean I have my own laptop and phone, why would I use a work device for that stuff?
Because you're traveling for work, and carrying two separate laptops eats into your limited baggage size/weight. Things are marginally better now that everything uses the same standard charger, but not much.
I make it a point to use the office bathrooms only to excrete food I ate from the work cafeteria. Personal food I ate at home I excrete in my personal bathroom.
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Maybe we should also call it labor camp.
I often joke with my family about going back to the salt mine when I leave for work.
That sounds like a truly dystopian take to me, but suppose you're right and nobody should ever use their work computer for anything personal.
Per TFA, this thing is literally taking screenshots of what is on the employee's screen. At work my screen sometimes had things such as: performance data on other employees, my own PII from HR systems, PII from customers, password managers, etc. It's also logging keystrokes. How many times do you type passwords a day.
Collecting that kind of information on purpose is truly wild. Imagine the security safeguards you would need just to prevent it from leaking. Wait what, they're explicitly collecting it to train LLMs with it? God help us all.
Your screenshots go to your managers, not just anyone in the company. At Meta there are very strict safeguards for preventing employees e.g. stalking their exes, so I'd assume the same security is used for even PII filled images.
Bwahaha. The same protections the NSA has?
The ones on the ‘inside’ are doing to 500% of the time I’m sure
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It might surprise you, but culturally, not all companies are this way. I know some are, but some are very different.
100% of the people at my company use their computer for personal tasks, and this is permissible under our policies. Our company is fully BYOD and owns zero computers, and zero cell phones.
In most civilized countries you absolutely do have significant rights to privacy on a work computer.
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.
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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 trivial burden.
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.
> 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
There's quite a difference between that and zero privacy, and there's also quite a difference between "IT policy says" or "the law permits" and "this is how things ought to be".
That said, between necessary endpoint security and the potential to get caught up in corporate legal disputes I feel like maintaining a strict separation is advisable. But that doesn't mean I support unnecessarily invasive surveillance or think it's a good thing.
/facepalm If we're going to debate norms and ethics, sending one liners into cyberspace won't get far. There are better ways. Invest in your conversational skills and listening skills, please. Otherwise you are a moth and HN is a streetlamp.
> 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 ?
If it's a work phone, yes they can.
Or toilets.
Yes? And by law so can all US phone companies.
And thanks to a secret interpretation of Section 702 by FISA courts, so can the FBI https://www.cato.org/blog/fisa-reauthorization-fear-mongerin...
https://www.fbi.gov/video-repository/think-before-you-post-p...
https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/fbi-can-neither-confir...
https://www.democracynow.org/2025/10/2/headlines/trump_direc...
https://www.levernews.com/are-you-on-the-fbis-new-watch-list...
https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2025-12-11/justice-de...
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...
Sure, and then DOGE exfiltrated their whistleblower database - which is 10x as intimidating.
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.
For what it’s worth I heard from a manager in Meta that they are doing this too.
>I will give a company the right to try to reproduce my output. But my very likeness and modus operandi? No.
You don't need to "give" them anything -- they already have everything they need due to basically anything you do, especially at work, especially while using company equipment, being legally considered "works made for hire" https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html + https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ30.pdf
Here's how a refusal to them doing whatever they think would maximize shareholder value with any of your output or data they collect from your company computer would actually go down: the company would do something you didn't like, you'd try to complain about it, HR would listen and document everything. In the best-possible case, they'd let you personally opt out. More likely, since you're likely very easy to replace in their minds, they'd refer you to their data privacy clauses in their acceptable usage policy section of the employee handbook, maybe reference the notice sent out to everyone about how they're doing this, then fire you for performance reasons a few months later. You'd be given an NDA and a very average severance, then you could choose to try to hire a lawyer (who would take at least a third of any pre-tax settlement amount) and fight them, in which case they'd settle for more or less the same as the severance package (and keep in mind both that and any court settlement are both taxable income, so you're not getting a windfall in any case), or you'd just sign the NDA and take the severance with no admission of wrongdoing on their part and no legal recourse.
Large companies employ entire orgs of lawyers who specialize in these matters, and it is literally their job to protect the company, not the employees, from lawsuits like this. Is it fully legal and in the clear? Probably not. Will they still 100% get away with it and leave employees with no realistic options or upside attempting to fight it? Of course. Welcome to America, land of the free for corporations which are legally people, just ones with infinite lives who cannot be arrested / imprisoned but can make legal decisions but cannot be subpoenaed. See eg https://www.theverge.com/policy/886348/meta-glasses-ice-doxx... for how the C-suite thinks about this type of thing.
Follow eg https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-and-75-organization... to see what actually happens.
More on how "work for hire" applies in a legal sense:
https://www.brookskushman.com/insights/innovations-at-work-w...
https://outsidegc.com/blog/common-misconceptions-about-the-w...
> Is it fully legal and in the clear? Probably not. Will they still 100% get away with it and leave employees with no realistic options or upside attempting to fight it? Of course.
I am aware of "how the C-Suite thinks about this type of thing", but this is also a good example to surface here of what to redline in future employment contracts. Yes, that will likely shut you out of a lot of places, but the opposite is beyond learned helplessness: it is capitulation to a future that will not end well for the tech worker.
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?
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.
Also, the agent doesn’t really work - but that doesn’t matter.
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.
No to disagree with you here because I wholly support this position. But I can see the problem from both angles. The problem, it seems to me, is that, and Im not sure which came first, employees started being reckless at work, probably because employers stopped caring about the treatment of their workers, which ramped up the viscous cycle to where we are now.
I can see an argument for companies not trusting there employee's because most employees harbor borderline corrupt thinking in their work place and have terrible work ethics, of course all of this is brought on by corporate culture so its there fault in the first place, but im not exactly sure what started where.
If "most" employees are corrupt and have terrible ethics, why is the company hiring them in the first place? I don't think I've ever worked anywhere I thought that a majority of my coworkers fit this description. This sounds pretty much identical to what the parent commentee said: it's a hiring problem. Either the company is bad at hiring people who don't have these traits or they're actively selecting for it.
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.
a bathroom stall is also a company property. Does the note about not expecting privacy extend there too?
>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?
"Unless I suggest it and then he will throw hands against anyone who is against me"
>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.
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Yeah, if at any time Mark can ask Meta AI ‘which of my employees insulted me today’ for example, that’s wild
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.
Until the day when Zuckerberg meets you, and his Ray Ban glasses profile your face and pull up that comment on your exit interview as pertinent information.
His eyes glaze over and he just reads that instead in his corner vision instead of listening to you, and you get snubbed forever more
As if you would ever be afforded an audience in the first place.
True, was thinking while writing that that was the most unlikely thing in the story which is wild
> I insulted him in my mandatory Exit Interview form from HR when I resigned.
How can they legally mandate an exit interview when you resigned? Is it part of the employment contract? What would have happened if you showed them the finger and not participated?
They can't legally mandate an exit interview, but they sure can pay you for one.
Nothing happens, it’s optional. However if you want to be able to be rehired it doesn’t hurt to do it. It doesn’t take long and you don’t really have to say anything.
Possibly nothing, possibly you'd get blacklisted and they'd share that with other companies in ways in which you'd never know or have any recourse https://fortune.com/2025/03/27/meta-block-list-hiring-employ...
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-block-lists-affect-your-...
https://medium.com/@ossiana.tepfenhart/the-no-hire-list-is-r...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/16/silicon-v...
In my experience at other companies recruiters and pretty much no one else has any idea that someone has been blacklisted, until you do all of your interviews and tell HR to hire that person and that's when they tell you the person is on some kind of shit list and we can't hire them. That was an awkward conversation with someone who was basically told we'll be making an offer soon.
What is the blacklist and is it company-specific?
I'd be more concerned about industry-wide blacklisting.
No it was company specific. Basically that person used to work for our company, years prior, in a different office in a different country.
But I also had a different situation where we also decided to hire someone, only to find out that we can't because he's been let go from another company owned by our parent company, and his severance agreement said he can't work for the same group of companies for 12 months. I think he was genuinely unaware that we're part of the same group(if was a huge corporation) and it just never came up in any conversation until HR tried to put together paperwork for him.
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.
Managers usually have the authority to bind the company to an employment contract. Even if they don't, the rule of "apparent authority" often means the employee can still sue.
In the USA this is mostly theoretical since HR could immediately fire the employee due to at-will employment.
But in Canada, it's a much bigger issue due to labour protections.
e.g. Many managers at American multinationals gave assurances over email to employees about work-from-home arrangements. Then the company does a huge RTO push.
When the employee refuses, HR discovers they can't fire the employee without a hefty buyout.
Best not to give assurances if you're managing a multinational team.
>>Managers usually have the authority to bind the company to an employment contract
Is that an American thing? I've been a manager for years and never heard of that happening. I didn't even know how much the people I managed were paid.
I believe it happens more often in Canada. Here's a case where the RTO ultimatum was ruled constructive dismissal, because the manager made a verbal agreement to amend the terms of employment.
https://mathewsdinsdale.com/employers-advisor-march-2025/#:~...
Narcissists often want to get the ones that ran away back to properly destroy them.
Should have framed it. Good job.
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.
Question: I have heard that at some tech companies that use internal chat software, the general practice is for IT to set it so that the messages are automatically deleted at the end of the day. In Google Chat this is a feature called "turn off history", and the idea behind it is that it can reduce a paper trail when there are investigations into the company doing something that's potentially monopolistic or otherwise shady.
If keystrokes are captured, isn't this a double-edged sword where maybe the company might be inadvertently collecting evidence against itself if there's an investigation and the investigators want to collect keystrokes?
Would require a government willing to hold criminals accountable even after taking bribery into account.
Meta employees are not typically known for their deep concerns about privacy.
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.
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There was a lot of open dissent on workplace from what I recall.
That's not a bug, that's a feature
Highly ironic that people who spend their lives building things that invade everyone else's privacy might now whinge about privacy themselves.
unless if everyone comes together to poison the data set
if you use your work machine at Facebook for dissent, you don't deserve a tech-adjacent job.
In most developed countries, dissent in the workplace is protected by labor laws.
I don't know about you, but corporate has a message on my screen before I log in:
"this computer is property of WORK CORP, you have no expectation of private on this computer"
If you want privacy use a personal device....
It's absolutely wild to me that anyone has ever operated under any other assumption. If you want to complain about your boss do it at happy hour.
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).
It being protected has nothing to do with a presumption of privacy in corporate communications. At a minimum you should be aware that your work related communications are subject to discovery.
It amazes me that people seem to think that once they have clocked in for work they have entered some kind of dystopian dictatorship where all their rights are immediately forfeited. And that people are fundamentally not allowed to push back against this kind of bullshit.
What right is forfeited? The only reasonable assumption to make is that your boss can read everything. Regardless of if you think it is fair or not it is still the safest assumption.
> You’d no longer be able to disent, or discuss anything non-work related with even the slightest expectation of privacy.
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).
I was pleasantly surprised to find that not to be the case, but I've always believed in their right to do so.
Why do people expect to have a right to do non-work related stuff on the job? Every company I've worked for states in the employment contract/policies what you can and cannot do on the job. They never enforce it to the extent that they outline in the policies, but it's usually clear cut.
If you want to rant about the company, do it outside the company! Or at a physical water cooler. When coworkers want to rant to me about the company, they don't use Slack/Teams. They message my personal, non-work number.
> 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.
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.
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Union busting is easy to do and hard to prove. This would act as a supporting regulation by making it more difficult. I imagine a legal framework similar to other privacy regulations: nothing about specific software or implementations, but instead new classes of data that are illegal to collect or store about your employees. There is complexity there, but something like mouse movements and keystrokes as described in the article is completely black and white.
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.
What do you think caused the change from being so employee-friendly to so employee-hostile?
I won't pretend to be a mind-reader of the executives involved. I was a line engineer, so effectively watching from the sidelines. It was temporally close to Sheryl Sandberg leaving her role as COO, but I have no insights into how much that was a factor, a reaction, or neither.
From my perspective a lot of it was downstream of over-hiring in the post-pandemic frenzy. It's hard to maintain that culture while doing large layoffs, and there's no incentive for them to do so beyond the longer term reality that many of their best employees have left and they're increasingly seen as a place to earn a top paycheck in between layoffs.
They were employee-friendly when they wanted to hire. It's been years of layoffs, with another 10% from May onward.
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.
it very obviously supports capital and if human life also then its just a side-effect*> The profession exists in support of human life.*this is just an observation, not a normative claim
> We make the substrate that civilization runs on.
That's a bit self-aggrandizing - especially for Software engineers.
I did mean engineers in general (I work with and have great respect for mechanical engineers, for example, and my folks were in construction), but I don't it's necessarily self-aggrandizing, either. I've worked on chat software and know people who met using my software and got married and have kids. I've worked on software somewhere in the chain of publishing important ideas, or just to share a joke.
I don't mean to say that this software was the only means of doing either of these things, of course. But we do make tools that people use regularly when living their lives. Sometimes it's just about being reliable or not getting in the way. The modern equivalent of flintstones and sharing stories around the fire.
It's about taking your work seriously - the qualities of what we make matter - and feeling some sense of purpose. And knowing who you're doing it for. I don't think that's being self-important.
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.
So, you're saying if I work at a factory, I should be able to use the factory equipment to build my stuff?
I've definitely worked places where I used the company Xerox machine to print up 50,000 "Unionize Now" fliers.
If you work at the factory you should be able to complain about the boss when he's out of earshot without him snooping.
If that's something he cant handle he might have a problem with personal accountability.
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.
Meta: look, you don't have to wear a diaper while you work, but those that do are 87% more likely to get promoted! The choice is yours!
the fact that the employees have voluntarily consented to wearing the diapers means that wearing the diaper is better than any alternative available to them, which proves that forcing employees to wear diapers maximizes total social utility
It's kind of funny to see how people here are reacting to the world they built when it finally comes to them
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.
You would love the world of Severance! Drop your humanity and individuality at the door. Become a mindless drone
Fitting username.
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.