Comment by dagmx
18 hours ago
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.
> Most job offers now come with statements about how you don't have right to your likeness
[citation needed]
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You never really owned what you typed or said at work in to their laptops, into their accounts using their software.
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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.
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It always happens to the most deserving group of people before it happens to you, and then there's no one to voice any concerns about your own fate, because they all got what you supposed they deserved.
TL;DR: The history of fascism and Nazism in the 1930s Europe.
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.
Former meta employee.
It's not like people have an unlimited number of places to work, even if they have Meta on their resume. Many of my colleagues (and myself included) had struggled in the job market in the past before landing at Meta. If it's work for Meta, or suffer more tumult in the hiring market; it's easy to understand why many might decide to take the offer even with the moral implications. I used to bring up politics in the office with coworkers and many people are simply unaware of the consequences of the company's products. There are a few different categories that these people fall into, but the main ones I saw in the office:
1) Chinese H1B holders who are happy to be working in the US at all, and generally apolitical (or view anything as better than the status quo of where they come from)
2) Just normal people who are interested in their own lives and have never been trained to think about the world in a big picture way (some overlap between 1&2 exist of course)
It's very western of us to always be tracking the conseqentiality of our actions even when we're just the cog in a wheel at BigCo. I think that it's the right thing to do, but this sort of reasoning largely absent in eastern cultures, or even for some in the west—even among those who are well educated. It's kind of hard to blame individuals when they either are rightfully consumed by worrying about their own welfare or are for whatever reason not as seminally hyperaware or woke as we can be in the west. Growing up I liked imposing my political philosophies onto everyone; maturity is understanding that even objectively righteous values are only useful for the right types of minds.
On the contrary, once someone has truly been made aware of the ramifications of their actions; it's more difficult for me to extend my sympathy to them. I consider mark and priscilla to be fully implicated based on their exposure to the harm that they're actively, willingly, knowingly causing. Other employees may never get that memo, though, people obviously avoid political talk in the workplace.
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My ex-employer (non-FANGA, but still over $10b mkt cap) started using similar software.
Feels good to read the "ex-"-part in your sentence. It'd be analog to my supervisor sitting right behind me and keeping a super dense protocol - no fucking way, ever.
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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!
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> 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.
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> metamates
It was metaapes, iirc.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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
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
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> 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?
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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.
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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.
Here's a wild idea..how about you know just talk?
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.
It's also much less of an undertaking to move companies than move countries
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?
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.
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.
> 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
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> 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.
I am a European in Europe and I expect the same. Why would I assume otherwise? The company laptop is full of spyware, starting from the OS. I have no reason to consider it "mine", and no desire to do so. If I want to do anything private (including things that my company would not like) I can do so from my private devices.
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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.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28241917
On a work computer? No there shouldn't and isn't.
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> 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 ?
Or toilets.
If it's a work phone, yes they can.
Yes? And by law so can all US phone companies.
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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.
> 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...
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/work_made_for_hire
https://crownllp.com/blog/what-is-a-work-for-hire/
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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?
We had the AI = Actually Indians meme, now we have Actually Indians = AI. The loop has been completed!
That's incredibly creepy tbh
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.
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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.
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.
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.
>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 bathroom stall is also a company property. Does the note about not expecting privacy extend there too?
At the risk of sounding like an LLM, a laptop is not just "something you get at work", it's literally your work tool. If you were hired at Shit Producers Inc as a defecator, you'd damn bet they would surveil the bathroom stalls there.
>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.
[dead]
> You’d no longer be able to disent, or discuss anything non-work related with even the slightest expectation of privacy.
One must be a fool to do any of this on any company-owned hardware. Facebook or no Facebook.
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.
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> 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.
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.
What do you think caused the change from being so employee-friendly to so employee-hostile?
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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*
*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.
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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.
> 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.
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?
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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!
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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.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1980WfKC0o
You would love the world of Severance! Drop your humanity and individuality at the door. Become a mindless drone
Fitting username.
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?
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.