An Engineer’s Post Protesting Laptop Surveillance Is Going Viral Inside Meta
Key takeaways
- The message aimed to rally support for a petition circulating inside the company since last Thursday that demands an end to what Meta calls the Model Capability Initiative.
- On one hand, I really enjoy using it to write software.
- The petition, also seen by WIRED, states that “it should not be the norm that companies of any size are permitted to exploit their employees by nonconsensually extracting their data for the purposes of Al training.”
Why this matters: a development in AI with implications for how people work, create, and decide.
Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images Comment Loader Save Story Save this story Comment Loader Save Story Save this story Meta’s decision to track employee keystrokes and mouse data is causing an uproar within the company. “Selfishly, I don't want my screen scraped because it feels like an invasion of my privacy,” wrote an engineer in an internal post seen by nearly 20,000 coworkers this week. “But zooming out, I don't want to live in a world where humans—employees or otherwise—are exploited for their training data.”
The message aimed to rally support for a petition circulating inside the company since last Thursday that demands an end to what Meta calls the Model Capability Initiative. It’s a piece of mandatory software that Meta began installing on the laptops of US employees last month. The tool records employees’ screens when using certain apps with the goal of collecting “real examples of how people actually use” computers, including “mouse movements, clicking buttons, and navigating dropdown menus,” according to Reuters. Meta has yet to say whether the initial data is paying off.
“I'm mixed on Al. On one hand, I really enjoy using it to write software. On the other hand, I'm really nervous about its impact on the world,” the engineer wrote in an internal forum for coders. “And what kind of norms are we establishing about how the technology is used, and how people are going to be treated?”