Comment by 2ndorderthought

16 hours ago

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.

27 comments

2ndorderthought

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butlike  12 minutes ago

The workers have always been assets though. They turn JIRA tickets into money. Any notion a company would treat a person as a human being and not a means to an end is unfounded, full-stop. The company is a machine that makes money. Machines do not have feelings.

toasty228  1 hour ago

> As much as it's funny to dunk on meta this type of surveillance is becoming the norm.

It already is illegal in developed and civilised countries

j45  11 hours ago

You never really owned what you typed or said at work in to their laptops, into their accounts using their software.

  • pjerem  10 hours ago

    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.

    • lanyard-textile  9 hours ago

      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.

      5 replies →

    • foepys  10 hours ago

      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.

    • Der_Einzige  8 hours ago

      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)

      6 replies →

  • wiseowise  8 hours ago

    I mean, even if there’s no law to handle this it’s a pretty shitty thing to do, don’t you think?

lynx97  9 hours ago

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.