alt Hacker NewsMeta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min
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AI? What happened to the Metaverse? I thought that was the future, mr Zuckerberg? What happened?
I hate it when companies use this kind of trick to get around legislation or privacy concerns.
"Employees are able to turn off tracking".
Sure, but there is a power imbalance, and employees will come to understand ( although never stated in any handbook ) that the rate at which they disable it will be taken into account in performance reviews.
Just like "unlimited PTO" is not a benefit, because employees self-regulate their use down to less than they'd get if they negotiated a fixed amount.
It's a twisted legal trick to get out of an obligation.
They need to unionize.
Do toilet breaks count towards the 30 minutes?
Similar to the LLM hype, the point of this program is to demonstrate labor's fealty to capital.
The message is: Fuck you if you're a software developer. Your skills are irrelevant. You should be grateful that we haven't made conditions even worse.
I don't know why anyone would accept a job there at this point. I mean, I never would have worked there because I didn't care about the mission (never been on any of the major platforms). But around a decade ago, when they were actively poisoning the mood around tech (and I was very angry that they were gonna cause the public to turn on us), I really would have thought so. But people want paychecks that allow a certain standard of living, so… I could understand.
If you take a job there today, what the hell is wrong with you?
That's very generous.
When the market turns (and it will regardless of how loudly AI cheerleaders proclaim otherwise), I just hope engineers as a whole remember this despicable behaviour by Zuckerberg.
The silver lining(If you can call it that) of the latest slump in tech employment is that it has laid bare the reality of the tech oligarchs. Someone should set up a website to catalog this behaviour so that these corporations and leaders can't easily sweep this under the rug in the future.
How considerate
Back to work slaves!
do the meta employees that code these stuff also get tracked?
Just enough time to...
After beta-testing widespread privacy invasive software on billions of their users, the employees now complain about the same technology being used against them.
That's just too bad and Meta does not care. If these employees don't like it, just leave Meta. (They won't).
I suggest they opt out of the whole 24 hours
Just don't blame me if your coding agent curses CEO and bypasses presubmits with dirty hacks a year later, I never volunteered to be a role model.
I used to work for a oil company, and 15 years ago they were discussing this idea of installing sensors on desk which they wanted to use for practical reasons: Instead of having to walk across the building to see someone, you could simply check on some internal website if they were at their desk. No wasted trip!
But that idea was shot down real fast by the unions, who informed the employer that it with great likelihood also would clash with data protection laws, and GDPR (this was not in the US). So it was quickly abandoned. Among workers that was one of the most dystopian ideas we had heard of.
Work stuff stays on work property.
Home stuff stays on home property.
Work wants me to use a phone for work, they get me a work phone. Or I dont do it.
Why? If you have ever had to go through discovery, Youd know. Company I worked for got sued by Oracle for bullshit licensing (aws RDS licensed oracle is evidently NOT for commercial use, sigh).
And know what they do for all engineers maintaining? They subpoena EVERYTHING.
If you did personal stuff on work machine, your personal stuff is now in lawsuit scope.
Meanwhile… Alan Dye breathes a sigh of relief and resumes another 30 minute session of Minesweeper.
Meta has written itself into a solid tyrant role. A million aspiring rebels are happy to play along.
I'm looking forward to the HN story sometime next year about employees being let go for opting out of tracking.
Can't you just use your own personal device and avoid the tracking entirely?
If you are wondering why they are doing things like this at FAANG, its because of this: YouTube /watch?v=YTuM-GS8Qak
Somehow this is way more dystopian than not having an opt out at all.
The corporate overlords are becoming too benevolent these days! Why not monitor employees' thoughts in real time?
Is this even legal in the EU?
Who in their right minds would trust this...?
Quite objectively, the track record for management demonstrating bad faith and lying about this is deep and long.
So much wild and insulting about this, but one thing is just the idea that it’s somehow more efficient to capture raw HCI data to train models to interact with computers better than humans can, rather than just doing the work to improve the software and interaction models in the first place. So much of the coming compute overbuild is going to be wasted on the stupidest ideas.
> new controls will allow employees to pause the data collection for "up to 30 minutes at a time" as well as request exemptions from the initiative altogether.
If they deny your exemption, make a tool that every 30 minutes fakes a bunch of nonsensical keystrokes for a few seconds, then automatically request another 30 minute pause. If they ever find out and confront you about it, say you’ve always heard Meta leadership encourages “moving fast and breaking things” and “asking for forgiveness instead of permission”, so you were only following the company’s ethos.
Or, you know, quit Facebook if you have the means.
oooh 30 whole minutes. This is so repulsive.
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30 minutes??
That's too long!
Every minute of their time should be accounted for. They've signed up their life to Zuck's AI. How else we gonna get that Zuck AI ??
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I mean I would want to do this when I do confidential stuff like HR and Payroll. I would be interested above what level are employees are exempt from this. I don't think Meta wants to train their AI on their own C-Level execs but who knows...it's Meta