Meta Pauses Employee-Tracking Program Following Internal Data Leak

Meta continuing to be the most shameless (and shameful to work for) company around.

I can't think of a single product of theirs that hasn't made the world a markedly worse place. Even their recent hardware foray is managing to find a way to ruin trust in everyday interactions (guys filming drunk girls with Ray Bans, surveillance, etc.).

Have several friends at the more 'thoughtful' frontier labs that bin meta applicants straight to the trash for this very reason.

If they're willing to do this to their own employees that they pay and supposedly wanted to keep around, what are they willing to do with your data? What are they willing to do with the systems they connect to your systems? "Dumb f*cks" has truly been the ethos of this company from day 1.

If you need to track you employee so hard and invesive, there is something wrong with your company

If you read the linked article it says the leaked data screenshot of some employees private conversation in plain text and other performance information.

It was a bold move to do full screen recording and hoping they would anonymize it.

For all those saying “if you’re not breaking the rules you have nothing to fear” consider that most firms regard “working to rule” to be a form of protest.

If you just follow their rules this surveillance will be used to identify and sanction you.

That system is going to be a nightmare in discovery

Garbage company going into a death spiral.

They paused it, but they fully intend to restart it.

Edit: I don’t know why I’m getting downvoted. Quite literally from the article:

> “We will only re-enable MCI when we are confident in the effectiveness of our data protection controls,” Kasriel said.

Meta must really be paying a lot!

They probably wrote the utility with AI - it's not that big a surprise that AI can't secure stuff.

panopticon for me and for thee!

seems fair enough

just wait for Microsoft to productize and commoditize employee tracking - see the CEO's recent "learning loops" idea - what could possibly go wrong?

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48636632

I'm making popcorn, anybody want some?

Zuck is so washed as a CEO.

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48636632

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The irony of a surveillance program being undone by its own data leaking is hard to miss. But the more interesting question is what happens next — do they rebuild it with better security, or does the backlash actually change the approach?

My guess is they rebuild it. The incentive to track performance metrics at scale is too strong, especially when layoffs are partly driven by those metrics. The leak just means they'll invest more in access controls and fewer people will have visibility into the raw data.

The uncomfortable part is that most large companies already do some version of this, just less formally. Tracking commit frequency, Slack activity, meeting attendance — it's all legible to management already. Meta just put a name on it and centralized it, which made it a target.

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I'll be the contrarian here.

I think the program was legal and morally fine.

Take into account that these are corporate computers, and the tracking is of work that the company is paying for, so the telemetry, which is highly valuable for analysis and automation, is rightfully theirs.

I also don't think that the purpose of the move was to manage workers and see if they slack off, it was to gather training data, but even if it were, I think that's normal? In any other job managers can, and are expected to, monitor employee productivity, they are paying for it, they need to ensure they are getting something worth. But again, I don't think that was the main goal here.

The computers are not intended for personal usage, if the employee wants to watch netflix, or porn, they are free to do so in their personal computers.

Imagine if this were a construction company, and there's a foreman watching the employees output, and the machine operators have their actions logged so that the machines can be automated in the future. Doesn't it sound reasonable? Is this very different at all?

So yeah, maybe a lot of people see Meta and computer tracking and immediately jump to 1984, but I kind of like nuance more than knee jerk reactions, or jumping into a narrative that we enjoy being angry about.