Benevolent dictator Zuck will give Meta staff 30-minute breaks from keylogging privacy assault

ai & ml

Tech biz teaching AI to use computers by slurping staff activity

Meta is reportedly backtracking on, or at least weakening, its plans to implement enhanced employee workplace monitoring following staff protests.

According to the latest internal memo on the matter, first reported by Reuters, Meta is still planning to capture employees’ keystrokes as previously understood, but it will allow Metalings to switch off the monitoring for 30-minute periods, and request a total exemption.

The memo was distributed to staff on Tuesday by Stephane Kasriel, veep at the company’s Superintelligence Labs AI division.

Kasriel said that, in addition to allowing staff to take half-hour privacy breaks, when the software is hoovering up their data, it will at least do it in a less resource-demanding manner.

Some staffers were complaining about the battery drain on their devices incurred by the initiative, while remote workers reported undue strain on their home internet usage.

The Register contacted Meta for a response but it did not reply, as was the case when we previously asked it to comment on the scheme around six weeks ago. According to reports in late April, the software now running on employee machines is part of what Meta calls the Model Capability Initiative.

The program’s goal is to capture workers’ keystrokes, mouse movements and screenshots of their devices at various points, all so Meta can build AI agents that better understand how humans use computers.

The irony of the people who help one of the internet’s most prolific data gluttons now being snooped on themselves is not lost on us.

Leaked audio recordings of an internal Meta meeting from April 30 revealed CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s attitude toward capturing all this information when he said it was in pursuit of building advanced AI models quicker than competitors.

“We are using this to feed a very large amount of content into the AI model, so that way it can learn how smart people use computers to accomplish tasks,” Zuckerberg purportedly said, per the recording leaked by worker advocacy group More Perfect Union. “I think that this is going to be a very big advantage if we can do it.”

Throughout Zuck’s six-minute monologue, he repeatedly referred to Meta staff as “smart people". Whether this was to soften the blow of constant monitoring, to seem personable amid mass layoffs, or both, is anyone's guess. 

Zuck said Meta chose to capture data from its own people rather than outside contractors because they were smarter than the workers they could bring in on a temporary basis.

The CEO confirmed Meta had no intention of using the data captured by the monitoring software to surveil employees’ activity or productivity, although he didn’t commit to saying the data would be anonymized. ®