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.
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.
It is even worse in France: if you code open source "on the side" of you work, at home, the company which employs you may claim the copyrights of it. I had to add explicit exclusion of this claim of copyrights in my job contracts to protect my personal work.
That was a few years back, dunno if that was fixed.
That is not correct; assuming you are not using an employer’s equipment on employer’s time, and/or working on what the employer pays you to do for them or are working on something that is competing and a few other reasonable caveats.
As far as I was told, this is not enough, you have to add extra legal care, even more if you are on an 'executive' type job contract, and you have to double that if there is "too much" connection/"look-a-like", between the software at work and the open source software you contribute to "at home".
On an french executive like contract, the boundary between "at home" and "at work" is very, very blurry.
AFAIK it's the same in the USA, that's why one of the first questions when interviewing with a company is to ask them about their moonlighting policy if you do want to work on a side project.
It varies by state in the USA. Some states have strong protections for work you do "on your own time, on your own equipment, that isn't connected to your work." Others, not so much...
This is common in North America too. In Canada, people really should be going through their personal projects and getting a moonlighting clause added before they sign any employment agreements. Employment has gotten tough so a lot of juniors aren’t doing this with their first jobs and we’ll start to see the ramifications of that in about five or ten years.
Can depend on the field too. I work in drug discovery and if the FDA was to request data that requires my computer they would have access to everything I had on it...Including my texts if I happened to log in to my personal apple account since it's a Mac.
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.
Reasonable personal use does not at all in any universe imply privacy from a personal perspective.
Is the same reason why they have to say reasonable.
It’s best to have separate devices so they just don’t have the intelligence about you. That can be permanent, left behind, and then increasingly possibly available to AI models forever.
Not having AI companies is reasonable trade off for not having all of my data including full DNA sequence being recorded 24/7 with absolutely zero care of privacy or protection and shared with everyone who has some marginal amount of money to buy it.
Thats... a poorly crafted mumble jumble without any underlying sense, even ignoring insults. Can't handle existence of society where quality of life is higher priority (and you see it on the ground very well) than some sum on account or meaningless titles and rat race achievements or office zero sum games?
It's obviously an unwitting parody account. Calling yourself "Der Einzige" while reciting an incoherent script of internet clichés is indistinguishable from satire -- hilariously unintentional parody.
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.
"Companies have shown us that IP going to AI providers is acceptable" This is where I'm expecting future collision; you can't both value IP for it's training value, and yet devalue it for the actual sources of IP (people owning their own likenesses or orgs collecting data from their own activity)
It's going to cause a major break at some point, probably sooner than later.
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. :)
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.
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.
What Meta does (and here I want to be clear that you can replace Meta with Apple, Microsoft, Google, Palantir...) is eventually public knowledge, profusely discussed even on HN. This means substantial amount of people have been aware, for decades.
And even if "just quit" is not an option - why not push for policy to regulate these corps? Why is it that after all this time, these same corps now also own at least 1 branch of the US government?
And when the EU/Australia/China.. tries to regulate punish those corps, suddenly everyone comes out on HN to explain protectionism, overreach, some -ism, and "actually we need to give them the benefit of the doubt" etc... why not support that momentum?
> And when the EU/Australia/China.. tries to regulate punish those corps, suddenly everyone comes out on HN to explain protectionism, overreach, some -ism, and "actually we need to give them the benefit of the doubt" etc... why not support that momentum?
I really, really want to believe it's bot warfare. But there is this running theme of HN posters who think because something is _legal_, or because you can point at it historically and go "acktually it's always been like this", it's therefore _moral_ and we should not ever push back on the excesses of these awful fucking companies.
> And even if "just quit" is not an option - why not push for policy to regulate these corps? Why is it that after all this time, these same corps now also own at least 1 branch of the US government?
Because money is the current representation and approximation of power. It used to be "the yams," but now it's money.
You remind me of my former, younger self and I applaud the appeal you are making to our better selves. All I'm stating is simply that many people don't care, or can't be made to care. But further, there is a pontificating nature about the way you reason about these workers. In the case of my colleagues at Meta, many feel that they are so fortunate to be able to work in the US at all. Even if they did care, it would be rational for them to continue working there against their moral qualms anyways. Because no one would choose to go back to their home country and do the same work for a paltry fraction of the pay.
Not speaking philosophically. I'm just talking about my experience on the ground working with chinese (as a fellow chinese). Some of them are interested in global affairs, certainly, but I find it to be more common from people raised in the west.
> 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.
If you care that your employer is being unethical (such as storing your keystrokes), that's being hyperaware, woke?
I know the definition of woke can stretch like taffy, but it now seems dislodged from its origins concerning race and gender and is now just a vague disparagement of any speaking up to injustice.
Was quite tired when i wrote this; just want to be on the record saying that i don't necessarily think that people in the east haphazardly just do whatever they're told. there's more nuance to it than that; but i just observe generally that in the east there isn't a culture of political motivation or organizing, or democracy at all. So it's not at all surprising when people don't assign any political meaning to their work—even in the cases where one so overtly exists.
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.
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.
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.
Why do you think they don't fully know what they are doing, they are smart folks. Now we all know how everybody needs to be the hero of their story, but self-lying only gets you so far in life, sub-consciousness will give you shit.
Don't put some mystery where simple greed is perfect enough explanation and there is little worry about others, some could use the word 'selfish' too. US society at large seems to me structured that way - there is no social net for the unlucky, healthcare also varies a lot based on disposable cash/job, good education is only for rich.
I've lived long enough to know that "smart" folks can be extremely dumb.
There are people who are naturally gifted and intelligent. These people can just pick up and learn different things on their own.
There are also people who do well at certain tasks and their life allowed them to obtain a higher education.
For example, I used to assume doctors were smart. However, the reality is that a small number of doctors are smart/intelligent people. Others are just going by the book, you throw them a curve ball and they fold. This applies to people at Meta, Google, NASA, and any organization.
I would argue smart/intelligent people see the negative impact of things BEFORE it affects THEM directly, there were people whistleblowing the real impact of smoking, fossil fuels before the information became public and well known.
I thought mass quitting in solidarity would happen when programmers realize how their work is used to train AI and replace them. How many quit because of that? Doesn't seem like many.
Apparently, money wins over principles for 99% of us. How is this different and how are we better than Meta employees?
I don't think the two things are comparable. While it would be inconvenient for me personally if I was replaced by AI, it would be an enormous social good as the resources saved could go somewhere else. The same could not be said about everyone under constant surveillance by some megacorp or the government.
Are you so sure that replacing humans is "enormous social good"? For whom is it good, exactly?
Also, capturing keystrokes and mouse movements only when at work and on work computer isn't really constant surveillance. Capturing all our code, text, photo and video (made at work or at home) seems worse and we don't bat an eye.
I work in a non-profit sector, if they could save money by replacing me they could use the money elsewhere where they desperately need money. So lots of people would benefit. That same principle wouldn't apply if I worked for some mega corp of course.
But the discussion was about Meta employees in general. They're heavily involved in the second type of surveillance that you alude to.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
