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Comment by 2ndorderthought

18 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.

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.

  • Machines don't have feelings. But if a human is subjected to machine treatment there should be safe guards. Otherwise we all may as well live in goo filled tubes like in the matrix. At some point we have to decide what is fair treatment for human beings, similar to how we decide fair treatment for lab rats and lab puppies.

    Would it benefit neural link to dog food their employees? What if there was a 5% chance of death. What if the employees signed in the dotted line anyway. Someone might say, sure that's fair play. Others might say as a society we shouldn't allow people to be treated as assets.

    Is it reasonable to change someone's job description to having every action they take be subjected to company ownership? Depends on who you ask I guess.

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.

      6 replies →

    • 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.

  • Sure, but our employers weren't selling our intermediate contributions to third parties in the past.

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

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.

  • This goes back to 1995 when I was just finishing up grade twelve but it left quite the taste in my mouth. The web industry was just starting to kick off in 1995 and people were opening up web design firms. At the time, young people had part time jobs and while my attempts to pump gas had all ended in rejection, I managed to get a job doing ‘web design’ which at the time meant typing things like <tr> and <td> hundreds of times a page.

    There were issues. One of the biggest was that it was 1994-1995, I lived in Regina and that city was not an early adopter. But the guy who ran the company had us doing all kinds of stuff for him.

    Then he ran out of money. Since he couldn’t pay his staff he tried to sell his almost non existent client list to a competitor. I got a little lost on the details because they didn’t really make sense but apparently I was supposed to work for free for six months so he could sell his client list and then pay me.

    I was 17 and really badly wanted to buy a Pentium processor before I started university so I was tempted but my parents had to explain that that was the single dumbest thing they had ever heard. I didn’t get a Pentium processor until 1997 because of that dude and I’m still a little bitter.

    Moral is, buy the client list so the nerds can get to 90mhz. :)