[dagmx]

This is going to be a huge chilling factor for employees. You’d no longer be able to disent, or discuss anything non-work related with even the slightest expectation of privacy.

Yes they could have accessed logs before but there’s a difference between directed checking after incidents and active surveillance at scale.

[Blackthorn]

Couldn't have happened to a more deserving group of people. My irony detector is sparking so badly I think it's about to blow.

[2ndorderthought]

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.

[toasty228]

> As much as it's funny to dunk on meta this type of surveillance is becoming the norm.

It already is illegal in developed and civilised countries

[2ndorderthought]

Well I see no effort for it in the US. So, keep everyone there in your thoughts and prayers. It's going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

[butlike]

They said developed AND civilized countries...

[dwedge]

Yeah the dunk was obvious

[pluralmonad]

This sort of surveillance is only possible in civilized societies.

[j45]

You never really owned what you typed or said at work in to their laptops, into their accounts using their software.

[pjerem]

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.

[lanyard-textile]

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.

[sylware]

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.

[Darwins_Toffees]

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.

[foepys]

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.

[j45]

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.

[Gud]

Only because you live in a rigged economic system.

[metabagel]

Sure, but our employers weren't selling our intermediate contributions to third parties in the past.

[wiseowise]

I mean, even if there’s no law to handle this it’s a pretty shitty thing to do, don’t you think?

[butlike]

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.

[metabagel]

Right.

https://thecorporation.com/

[trivo]

We live in a society. Worker rights are a thing. Human rights are a thing. This should not be allowed.

[2ndorderthought]

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.

[zeruch]

"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.

[unmole]

> Most job offers now come with statements about how you don't have right to your likeness

[citation needed]

[2ndorderthought]

It's pretty common, Google it. Here is a website that will help your ai draft job offers with example clauses for it

https://www.lawinsider.com/clause/right-to-use-employees-nam...

[metabagel]

I recall that being in my employment contract.

[lynx97]

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.

[2ndorderthought]

It's true. I think the difference is that now it has slightly different implications as well as scale.

[hluska]

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. :)

[isodev]

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.

[nikkwong]

Former meta employee.

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.

[isodev]

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?

[mulr00ney]

> 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.

[butlike]

> 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.

[nikkwong]

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.

[Planktonne]

> 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

An awful lot of Eastern philosophy would disagree with you.

[nikkwong]

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.

[gausswho]

> 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.

[nikkwong]

I'm not referring to that, obviously; I'm referring to Metas impacts worldwide.

[nikkwong]

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.

[duped]

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon him not understanding it

[ludicrousdispla]

This has nothing to do with politics, or political talk. People's complaints are about dishonesty, abuse, and manipulation on the part of Meta.

[itake]

My ex-employer (non-FANGA, but still over $10b mkt cap) started using similar software.

[whilenot-dev]

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.

[itake]

while not the main reason, I definitely cited it as a reason for departure in my exit interview.

[sandworm101]

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.

[gdhkgdhkvff]

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.

[Blackthorn]

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!

[shimman]

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.

[kakacik]

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.

[avgDev]

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.

[JoshTriplett]

> This is the exact type of thing that software IC’s should reject in solidarity.

Yes. Which includes quitting, en masse, from any company that does this.

Meta ought to find it impossible to employ anyone with a policy like this.

[gamerslexus]

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?

[DharmaPolice]

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.

[gamerslexus]

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.

[GuinansEyebrows]

> it would be an enormous social good as the resources saved could go somewhere else

they can, will and are going directly into like 9 sociopath's pockets at your peril.

[leptons]

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.

[ianbutler]

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.

[quadrifoliate]

This really depends on where you are. In the Bay Area it may be 2019 levels, in other parts of the country it is way worse than 2019.

[hx8]

The tech job market was about 2019 levels a year ago. It's materially worse now.

[gdhkgdhkvff]

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.

[simpaticoder]

So, like an intersection of workers?

[lamasery]

This shit's why the industry should have unionized when times were good.

It's not just for pay, it's for pushing back on inhumane horse crap.

[butlike]

More like Metamites amirite?! Annoying af call an exterminator

[wiseowise]

> metamates

It was metaapes, iirc.

[wartywhoa23]

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.

[Blackthorn]

This argument would be a lot more convincing if it wasn't the people actually doing the surveillance.

The ones who are doing the bad thing are the ones that are having that bad thing happen to them! That's good! That's how you get an actual change!

[bsilvereagle]

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.

[resident423]

There are also large organizations at Meta focussed on the optimal distribution of scam ads to the elderly.

https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...

[dlev_pika]

I guess Palantir is cool as long as they keep the queer interest group going

[Teever]

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.

[JuniperMesos]

I already assume that on a work computer everything I'm doing could be monitored by work IT. At every job I've had, I've made a point of not using work hardware for anything I even remotely thought someone at the job might object to. Instead I use my own hardware for that kind of thing - I own a smartphone, I own multiple computers, this is not hard to do.

When I worked at a startup that had some internal conflict between the software engineers and management, someone made a Signal group to chat about the issues among the software engineers privately and everyone joined that group with their own Signal accounts, without any kind of issue.

[DanielHB]

This actually came up with multiple companies I worked at in Sweden. Apparently the law here is quite strict that you _can_ use your computer for personal matters and that your employer is not allowed to spy on you on those matters.

So they can monitor your email and slack server-side, but not your client-side stuff that doesn't touch their servers. However if you use a VPN then they can also monitor your DNS requests and every website you visit. Any kind of client-side telemetry is limited to a few things, however those things can involve what applications you have installed (like spotify) for security reasons or USB sticks plugged in.

[renegade-otter]

There is no expectation of privacy on your work machine - that's a given.

We know this is not for security - this data will be collected and weaponized against employees during layoffs. Meta is already doing this for those who are not enthusiastically switching from coding to prompting.

I expect to be monitored, I do not expect to be watched.

If I need to kick back for 20 minutes to think on a problem, I don't want the company to be chewing me out because my mouse movements were not frantic.

[eska]

This may be legally challenging if you’re not allowed to communicate company internal information and especially files outside of company hardware.

[catcowcostume]

> Yes they could have accessed logs before but there’s a difference between directed checking after incidents and active surveillance at scale.

[JuniperMesos]

Not really from the perspective of my own risk/reward calculation. I don't know in advance what's going to be considered an "incident" that will make corporate IT suddenly want to search my work computer. Better to simply have a policy of never using a computer my work controls for personal data, especially when I already have my own computers for that that I use regardless of what job I happen to be working at.

[johntash]

Keep in mind this isn't just about personal data on work hardware. It also leads to things like "we noticed you didn't move your mouse or type anything for 45 minutes, what were you doing?" type of micromanagement.

[everdrive]

Yes, but I cannot imagine Meta cares about chilling their employees. They're deep into the "extract more value" phase and are no longer bringing in the cutting edge talent.

[stringfood]

at this point employees should be kept in cold storage to acclimate so as to prevent being shocked from any more chilling announcements. also will cut down on bathroom breaks

[renegade-otter]

Right, it's extraction on steroids. They can no longer extract more from customers, so employees are obviously next.

In a healthy capitalism, you take care of customers, then employees, then shareholders. In that exact order. Right now the incentives are ass-backwards.

[resident423]

Meta employees are not typically known for their deep concerns about privacy.

[reroute22]

Don't confuse employees with execs. It's a gigantic company with almost 80k employees.

Most cultures around the world are acutely aware that the actions and opinions of their leaders are not a reflection of behaviors and opinions of regular citizen.

[duskdozer]

It's also much less of an undertaking to move companies than move countries

[shimman]

Oh come on, these are some of the highest income earning employed workers on the planet and they have constantly shown they are A-okay with working on systems that enable mass misery, have no qualms against profiting off a genocide, are more than happy to give conference talks on how they implement mass surveillance.

Sorry but these lot are truly an evil bunch, just blaming the executives is foolish. The executives are absolutely helpless, they can't do any of this on their own but they convinced some of the worse humans on the planet to do it for them.

[reroute22]

Execs was indeed more of a metaphorical description.

A small subset of individuals working there.

You don't need 80k people to make policy decisions, Meta is that big not because of policy makers, but because of infrastructure people and people working on all sorts of Meta's attempts to enter other markets to expand their business, markets that have nothing to do with addictive and/or exploitative social networking products.

A president of a country also can't do anything by themselves, they need a small army of supporters in positions of influence. And still the said army is a percent of the total population.

Besides, let's be real here, yes, Meta's is one of the worst in terms of overall impact, e.g. certainly worse than Google out of the big ones, but the difference is not as big as one might imagine.

Meta also powers WhatsApp, which is basically an operating system of the entire region of Southeast Asia and India, and also a large portion of South America, which together host >2.5B people. Loosing that particular part of Meta (if Meta was to fail) would be a big loss to humanity, loss that Western dwellers refuse to know or accept, but ask anyone living in those areas they'll tell you how much of the economic boom of late in those places rides on connectivity provided by WhatsApp.

Google on the other hand owns YouTube, and in my personal anecdotal experience I get a heck of a lot more misery from YouTube and especially Shorts that I can't seem to escape or avoid, than I do from TikTok or Instagram neither of which I use at all and have no issue ensuring 0 interactions with.

Yes, in the end both do both good and bad, and yet in grand total Meta is worse than Google, but A) the difference isn't as large, and B) it's actually a lot harder to tell than it seems if the net result is even negative in the end. It probably is, but it's hard to tell definitively. As in, stating that some parts of Meta's business are better die and the humanity will be better off is undeniably correct, stating that all of it just needs to seize to exist sounds more like a hyperbolical illustration of sentiment, not an objectively sound proposition necessarily.

[simmerup]

Yeah, if at any time Mark can ask Meta AI ‘which of my employees insulted me today’ for example, that’s wild

[kridsdale1]

I insulted him in my mandatory Exit Interview form from HR when I resigned.

It had no impact of recruiters trying to win me back since then.

[gambiting]

In my experience at other companies recruiters and pretty much no one else has any idea that someone has been blacklisted, until you do all of your interviews and tell HR to hire that person and that's when they tell you the person is on some kind of shit list and we can't hire them. That was an awkward conversation with someone who was basically told we'll be making an offer soon.

[mancerayder]

What is the blacklist and is it company-specific?

I'd be more concerned about industry-wide blacklisting.

[gambiting]

No it was company specific. Basically that person used to work for our company, years prior, in a different office in a different country.

But I also had a different situation where we also decided to hire someone, only to find out that we can't because he's been let go from another company owned by our parent company, and his severance agreement said he can't work for the same group of companies for 12 months. I think he was genuinely unaware that we're part of the same group(if was a huge corporation) and it just never came up in any conversation until HR tried to put together paperwork for him.

[balamatom]

Huh. What do you reckon would have happened if you'd hired them anyway?

[computably]

What? Hiring is a contract between employer (company entity) and employee. No individual "you" can hire anybody except through the company's official process. If HR says "no we won't extend an offer," a lowly HM extending an offer would be clear-cut fraud.

[jjmarr]

Managers usually have the authority to bind the company to an employment contract. Even if they don't, the rule of "apparent authority" often means the employee can still sue.

In the USA this is mostly theoretical since HR could immediately fire the employee due to at-will employment.

But in Canada, it's a much bigger issue due to labour protections.

e.g. Many managers at American multinationals gave assurances over email to employees about work-from-home arrangements. Then the company does a huge RTO push.

When the employee refuses, HR discovers they can't fire the employee without a hefty buyout.

Best not to give assurances if you're managing a multinational team.

[balamatom]

I meant what would have happened - and to whom - if HR had greenlighted the offer, but others' posts pretty much clarified that for me, thanks.

[simmerup]

Until the day when Zuckerberg meets you, and his Ray Ban glasses profile your face and pull up that comment on your exit interview as pertinent information.

His eyes glaze over and he just reads that instead in his corner vision instead of listening to you, and you get snubbed forever more

[seanp2k2]

As if you would ever be afforded an audience in the first place.

[simmerup]

True, was thinking while writing that that was the most unlikely thing in the story which is wild

[shermantanktop]

That’d be a snub to cherish.

[BeetleB]

> I insulted him in my mandatory Exit Interview form from HR when I resigned.

How can they legally mandate an exit interview when you resigned? Is it part of the employment contract? What would have happened if you showed them the finger and not participated?

[OkayPhysicist]

They can't legally mandate an exit interview, but they sure can pay you for one.

[zeroonetwothree]

Nothing happens, it’s optional. However if you want to be able to be rehired it doesn’t hurt to do it. It doesn’t take long and you don’t really have to say anything.

[seanp2k2]

Possibly nothing, possibly you'd get blacklisted and they'd share that with other companies in ways in which you'd never know or have any recourse https://fortune.com/2025/03/27/meta-block-list-hiring-employ...

https://www.businessinsider.com/how-block-lists-affect-your-...

https://medium.com/@ossiana.tepfenhart/the-no-hire-list-is-r...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/16/silicon-v...

[storus]

Narcissists often want to get the ones that ran away back to properly destroy them.

[LightBug1]

Should have framed it. Good job.

[zepppotemkin]

He's already got the willing-intern-finder.md skill locked and loaded

[kube-system]

All enterprise messaging apps support exporting your DMs today, for legal compliance.

[sassymuffinz]

Highly ironic that people who spend their lives building things that invade everyone else's privacy might now whinge about privacy themselves.

[PradeetPatel]

Tbh that's to be expected, the work machine is the company's property and there shouldn't be any expectation of privacy.

I work at a tech firm in India, and we are encouraged to create skills.md based on the traits of our colleagues, with the intention of reducing key personnel risk. A handful of engineers were let go as the result of a re-alignment, and their AI counterparts are actively maintaining their code.

I wonder if this is where they are going.

[piker]

> A handful of engineers were let go as the result of a re-alignment, and their AI counterparts are actively maintaining their code.

Feel like I'm reading a Gibson novel here.

[lazide]

Hint: it’s also fiction

[PradeetPatel]

I wish. Check out colleagues.ai as the Chinese equivalent of the programme.

[lodovic]

That domain is for sale. This whole thread sounds like one of these "I sell ai agents as a saas and make 30k/month" stories.

[lazide]

If that actually replaces your coworker, I feel sorry for everyone.

[jaapz]

There shouldn't be any expectation of privacy? There absolutely should!

[ryandrake]

Whether they should or shouldn't, you have to expect that your company has root on your work device or at least some sort of corporate admin profile that gives them access to everything on the device and all attached peripherals. This has been pretty standard at IT / tech companies for as long as I've been in the workforce. I personally wouldn't do anything personal on a work computer, from sending personal E-mails all the way up to storing nudes on it. Why do that when a separate personal computer is cheap and solves the problem entirely?

EDIT: I remember, an example of this actually came up a while ago on HN. An Apple employee had to return a device unwiped, due to legal discovery, but the device had intimate pictures on it[1]. Oops! Don't do that, people.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28241917

[satvikpendem]

On a work computer? No there shouldn't and isn't.

[whateverboat]

This is Stockholm syndrome. Sure, you can enforce zero privacy on work computers, it will just lead to shitty work culture and lowered productivity.

[unmole]

I don't see how people using a work computer exclusively for work would lead to a shitty work culture, let alone lowered productivity.

[cyclopeanutopia]

Why not? How about a company-owned toilet? It's their property as well.

[satvikpendem]

You're right, maybe they should put cameras in there too. But there's a reason we don't yet every worker still explicitly or implicitly knows not to use their work computer for personal tasks, as people can and do get fired for doing so.

[cyclopeanutopia]

This is a ridiculous statement. Everyone I know at my company uses work laptops for personal stuff. It's not in the land of freedom though, so great leaders like yourself can't fire people at will.

TBH at this point I don't believe you are a real person.

[rebolek]

Maybe we should also call it labor camp.

[the-peter]

I make it a point to use the office bathrooms only to excrete food I ate from the work cafeteria. Personal food I ate at home I excrete in my personal bathroom.

[kube-system]

It might surprise you, but culturally, not all companies are this way. I know some are, but some are very different.

100% of the people at my company use their computer for personal tasks, and this is permissible under our policies. Our company is fully BYOD and owns zero computers, and zero cell phones.

[AgentOrange1234]

That sounds like a truly dystopian take to me, but suppose you're right and nobody should ever use their work computer for anything personal.

Per TFA, this thing is literally taking screenshots of what is on the employee's screen. At work my screen sometimes had things such as: performance data on other employees, my own PII from HR systems, PII from customers, password managers, etc. It's also logging keystrokes. How many times do you type passwords a day.

Collecting that kind of information on purpose is truly wild. Imagine the security safeguards you would need just to prevent it from leaking. Wait what, they're explicitly collecting it to train LLMs with it? God help us all.

[satvikpendem]

Your screenshots go to your managers, not just anyone in the company. At Meta there are very strict safeguards for preventing employees e.g. stalking their exes, so I'd assume the same security is used for even PII filled images.

[lazide]

Bwahaha. The same protections the NSA has?

The ones on the ‘inside’ are doing to 500% of the time I’m sure

[rexpop]

I spend the majority of my adult life working, and you're telling me I should spend it surveilled?

[seanp2k2]

You already do and your consent is part of your employment. Check your employee handbook, search for things like "data privacy" and understand how https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ30.pdf applies in the modern world, especially around AI. TL;DR companies can do whatever they want with your work / observe you and you have no real meaningful recourse.

[rexpop]

I'm sorry, did God Almighty write the employee handbook?

[sho_hn]

In most civilized countries you absolutely do have significant rights to privacy on a work computer.

[xpe]

/facepalm If we're going to debate norms and ethics, sending one liners into cyberspace won't get far. There are better ways. Invest in your conversational skills and listening skills, please. Otherwise you are a moth and HN is a streetlamp.

[euroderf]

> the work machine is the company's property and there shouldn't be any expectation of privacy.

A bogus argument, methinks. Consider that the company also owns the phones, but can or do they listen to every phone call ?

[cyclopeanutopia]

Or toilets.

[satvikpendem]

If it's a work phone, yes they can.

[mulmen]

Yes? And by law so can all US phone companies.

[seanp2k2]

And thanks to a secret interpretation of Section 702 by FISA courts, so can the FBI https://www.cato.org/blog/fisa-reauthorization-fear-mongerin...

https://www.fbi.gov/video-repository/think-before-you-post-p...

https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/fbi-can-neither-confir...

https://www.democracynow.org/2025/10/2/headlines/trump_direc...

https://www.levernews.com/are-you-on-the-fbis-new-watch-list...

https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2025-12-11/justice-de...

[Frieren]

> Tbh that's to be expected, the work machine is the company's property and there shouldn't be any expectation of privacy.

> I work at a tech firm in India

First I wondered how can you have such a low expectation on privacy, then you answered my question. What you need in India is more unionization and fight against corruption. It is becoming worse here in Europe but in India you do not have the protections that we have. Without that you will have no rights.

You will have to fights to get rights at your job. In the same way that Europeans are going to have to fight to keep them.

[sebtron]

I am a European in Europe and I expect the same. Why would I assume otherwise? The company laptop is full of spyware, starting from the OS. I have no reason to consider it "mine", and no desire to do so. If I want to do anything private (including things that my company would not like) I can do so from my private devices.

[eertami]

Europe is a big place, but in my area of Europe it is very illegal to monitor employees this way. If you were to be fired for something that illegal surveillance turned up, I would consider it a good thing - with the settlement money you could take a couple years of vacation.

[type0]

> with the settlement money you could take a couple years of vacation.

In many EU countries even if privacy protection is strong on paper, the settlement will be so low compared to US that you won't afford to take any vacation.

[ForHackernews]

I've never worked a software development job where I didn't have a company-provided machine that I installed Linux on. I installed the OS, I have root on the machine, I wiped it and returned it empty when I was leaving the job.

[sebtron]

Lucky you, I guess. In all the companies I worked for I have had a company-provided Windows laptop where the OS was managed by IT. The degree of freedom (e.g. what software could I install, what websites were blocksd) varied.

[reaperducer]

Tbh that's to be expected, the work machine is the company's property and there shouldn't be any expectation of privacy.

There remains a thing called human dignity.

If a company can't trust the people it hires, that's a fault in the hiring process, not the employees.

[trinsic2]

No to disagree with you here because I wholly support this position. But I can see the problem from both angles. The problem, it seems to me, is that, and Im not sure which came first, employees started being reckless at work, probably because employers stopped caring about the treatment of their workers, which ramped up the viscous cycle to where we are now.

I can see an argument for companies not trusting there employee's because most employees harbor borderline corrupt thinking in their work place and have terrible work ethics, of course all of this is brought on by corporate culture so its there fault in the first place, but im not exactly sure what started where.

[saghm]

If "most" employees are corrupt and have terrible ethics, why is the company hiring them in the first place? I don't think I've ever worked anywhere I thought that a majority of my coworkers fit this description. This sounds pretty much identical to what the parent commentee said: it's a hiring problem. Either the company is bad at hiring people who don't have these traits or they're actively selecting for it.

[futuraperdita]

> A handful of engineers were let go as the result of a re-alignment, and their AI counterparts are actively maintaining their code.

I know you’re in India, but in the US, could this not be considered intellectual property theft on “right of publicity”? Your persona and working style is one of your core values you bring to market; building a simulacrum of that is not something I expect to be part of the “your output is the company’s IP” in an existing contract.

I will give a company the right to try to reproduce my output. But my very likeness and modus operandi? No.

[vinni2]

For what it’s worth I heard from a manager in Meta that they are doing this too.

[seanp2k2]

>I will give a company the right to try to reproduce my output. But my very likeness and modus operandi? No.

You don't need to "give" them anything -- they already have everything they need due to basically anything you do, especially at work, especially while using company equipment, being legally considered "works made for hire" https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html + https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ30.pdf

Here's how a refusal to them doing whatever they think would maximize shareholder value with any of your output or data they collect from your company computer would actually go down: the company would do something you didn't like, you'd try to complain about it, HR would listen and document everything. In the best-possible case, they'd let you personally opt out. More likely, since you're likely very easy to replace in their minds, they'd refer you to their data privacy clauses in their acceptable usage policy section of the employee handbook, maybe reference the notice sent out to everyone about how they're doing this, then fire you for performance reasons a few months later. You'd be given an NDA and a very average severance, then you could choose to try to hire a lawyer (who would take at least a third of any pre-tax settlement amount) and fight them, in which case they'd settle for more or less the same as the severance package (and keep in mind both that and any court settlement are both taxable income, so you're not getting a windfall in any case), or you'd just sign the NDA and take the severance with no admission of wrongdoing on their part and no legal recourse.

Large companies employ entire orgs of lawyers who specialize in these matters, and it is literally their job to protect the company, not the employees, from lawsuits like this. Is it fully legal and in the clear? Probably not. Will they still 100% get away with it and leave employees with no realistic options or upside attempting to fight it? Of course. Welcome to America, land of the free for corporations which are legally people, just ones with infinite lives who cannot be arrested / imprisoned but can make legal decisions but cannot be subpoenaed. See eg https://www.theverge.com/policy/886348/meta-glasses-ice-doxx... for how the C-suite thinks about this type of thing.

Follow eg https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-and-75-organization... to see what actually happens.

More on how "work for hire" applies in a legal sense:

https://www.brookskushman.com/insights/innovations-at-work-w...

https://outsidegc.com/blog/common-misconceptions-about-the-w...

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/work_made_for_hire

https://crownllp.com/blog/what-is-a-work-for-hire/

[futuraperdita]

> Is it fully legal and in the clear? Probably not. Will they still 100% get away with it and leave employees with no realistic options or upside attempting to fight it? Of course.

I am aware of "how the C-Suite thinks about this type of thing", but this is also a good example to surface here of what to redline in future employment contracts. Yes, that will likely shut you out of a lot of places, but the opposite is beyond learned helplessness: it is capitulation to a future that will not end well for the tech worker.

[jedbrown]

Strong disagree (especially under US law). Consider what this means for union organizing in the context of this 2022 NLRB memo.

> Under settled Board law, numerous practices employers may engage in using new surveillance and management technologies are already unlawful. In cases involving employer observation of open protected concerted activity and public union activity like picketing or handbilling, the Board has recognized that “pictorial recordkeeping tends to create fear among employees of future reprisals.”10 The Board accordingly balances an employer’s justification for surveillance “against the tendency of that conduct to interfere with employees’ right to engage in concerted activity.”11 In that context, “the Board has long held that absent proper justification, the photographing of employees engaged in protected concerted activities violates the Act because it has a tendency to intimidate.”12

https://www.nlrb.gov/news-outreach/news-story/nlrb-general-c...

[lazide]

Sure, and then DOGE exfiltrated their whistleblower database - which is 10x as intimidating.

[Reisen]

Wait so the engineers doing novel work are ousted; you fire the engineer that had the skill set to produce the work in the first place? Surely this is creating a Stasi-like neighbour snitching environment with chilling effect where the better you do the faster you become a target for replacement by engineer's incentivized to win points by replacing you. Even being very charitable where the scenario is the code was so poor that the code the employee is working on is so entrenched in domain knowledge they've become a huge bus factor, an LLM is going to make that kind of code worse. I'm struggling to imagine the subset of people this replaces that is not a long term detriment to everyone working there. Those people became "key personnel" for a reason no?

[Hamuko]

>we are encouraged to create skills.md based on the traits of our colleagues

Like that "Scott is an asswipe who never agrees to any idea that isn't his" or what?

[downrightmike]

"Unless I suggest it and then he will throw hands against anyone who is against me"

[Saline9515]

We had the AI = Actually Indians meme, now we have Actually Indians = AI. The loop has been completed!

[IAmGraydon]

>A handful of engineers were let go as the result of a re-alignment, and their AI counterparts are actively maintaining their code.

This is exactly what they're doing, and they aren't the only ones.

[nickvec]

Just speculating, but the intention wasn't reducing key personnel risk. It was so that your employer could fire them and replace them with an agent running off of their associated skills.md.

[lazide]

Also, the agent doesn’t really work - but that doesn’t matter.

[Lihh27]

skills.md heh they serialized you into a config file and used it to boot your replacement. could've at least picked a better extension.

[rimliu]

a bathroom stall is also a company property. Does the note about not expecting privacy extend there too?

[throw-the-towel]

At the risk of sounding like an LLM, a laptop is not just "something you get at work", it's literally your work tool. If you were hired at Shit Producers Inc as a defecator, you'd damn bet they would surveil the bathroom stalls there.

[izacus]

That doesn't mean it's suddenly ok to monitor every second of your life while you work.

[jmorenoamor]

That's incredibly creepy tbh

[duskdozer]

Well, no, there should be an expectation of privacy; an employer shouldn't just be able to have a palantír for their employees.

>I work at a tech firm in India, and we are encouraged to create skills.md based on the traits of our colleagues, with the intention of reducing key personnel risk. A handful of engineers were let go as the result of a re-alignment, and their AI counterparts are actively maintaining their code.

Okay, now this sounds like satire. But I suppose that's the way the world is going.

[layman51]

Question: I have heard that at some tech companies that use internal chat software, the general practice is for IT to set it so that the messages are automatically deleted at the end of the day. In Google Chat this is a feature called "turn off history", and the idea behind it is that it can reduce a paper trail when there are investigations into the company doing something that's potentially monopolistic or otherwise shady.

If keystrokes are captured, isn't this a double-edged sword where maybe the company might be inadvertently collecting evidence against itself if there's an investigation and the investigators want to collect keystrokes?

[plagiarist]

Would require a government willing to hold criminals accountable even after taking bribery into account.

[blharr]

Any fallout or monetary changes you could sue for, a company like Meta can probably pay for and still turn their huge profits. It seems like these companies do little to hide their shady actions at all.

[ButlerianJihad]

I became increasingly irritated at my employer's BYOD policy.

When I got hired (pandemic lockdowns) all they asked is, "Do you have your own computer? Can you install stuff on it?" and my answer was yes, I had a Linux desktop machine. Of course all their software was specified for Windows and I had to be the one making it all work, but it all really did, and we were fine.

It was an education company and we were teaching cybersecurity, and so the students were not only BYOD, but we were limping by with gratis software downloads and free trials of stuff like Azure and Spelunk. The installation sessions could get really bogged down as we tried to troubleshoot each student's unique setup, and it wasn't really our job, but the software was mission-critical to the class!

I maintained strict separation of accounts with no personal usage in my work-accounts and no work usage in my personal-accounts. My mobile phone was sacrosanct, but see below!

So eventually my role got to a point where all I really needed was Zoom and a web browser that could do Google Workspaces. But then I also became irritated by the creeping nature of MFA. I got really mad when our payroll site unilaterally decided that my personal mobile number was fair game for this. I said I am not mingling my phone into this deal. Eventually I was forced to delete the number, which forced use of my work email instead.

Between this job and volunteering, I became acutely aware of the real issues surrounding WFH and BYOD. I was especially sensitive that any litigation, any subpoenas or discovery involving my employer, could result in confiscation of my actual hardware from home! What if I was doing their bidding on a personal device and some court order needs it or the cops just rush in and pluck it all out? I wouldn't have any recourse.

Now, that is admittedly a far-fetched, even nuclear option. Realistically if I'm working with a reputable employer, it won't happen. But it could, and it'd be disastrous. And that's why I'm very wary of BYOD policies like that, and any mingling of personal resources with work. You're playing with fire.

[romanovcode]

> You’d no longer be able to disent, or discuss anything non-work related with even the slightest expectation of privacy.

One must be a fool to do any of this on any company-owned hardware. Facebook or no Facebook.

[engineer_22]

I don't know about you, but corporate has a message on my screen before I log in:

"this computer is property of WORK CORP, you have no expectation of private on this computer"

If you want privacy use a personal device....

[bagels]

There was a lot of open dissent on workplace from what I recall.

[samiv]

Here's a wild idea..how about you know just talk?

[gwerbin]

That's not a bug, that's a feature

[ModernMech]

I've always said if corporations were governments they would be totalitarian fascistic dictatorships. This is just them evolving to their final form. No idea why anyone would want to work at a corporation like Meta by choice the same way I don't understand why anyone would move to North Korea, but I guess the money is just that good.

[mizzao]

Ah, fantastic, gives off Aperture Science (from Half-life 2) vibes!

[b65e8bee43c2ed0]

if you use your work machine at Facebook for dissent, you don't deserve a tech-adjacent job.

[reaperducer]

In most developed countries, dissent in the workplace is protected by labor laws.

[pocksuppet]

In most developed countries, the workplace punishes it anyway, because they can and it's hard to get the law enforced.

[nacozarina]

he’s trying to prove he can lick boots even harder

[boombapoom]

unless if everyone comes together to poison the data set

[weezing]

Imagine discussing anything non-work related through company channels. Why would you do that?

[mulmen]

It's absolutely wild to me that anyone has ever operated under any other assumption. If you want to complain about your boss do it at happy hour.

[reaperducer]

It's absolutely wild to me that anyone has ever operated under any other assumption.

Maybe because they're aware that complaining about the boss is protected by law (in the United States and many other countries).

[mulmen]

It being protected has nothing to do with a presumption of privacy in corporate communications. At a minimum you should be aware that your work related communications are subject to discovery.

[anonymousDan]

It amazes me that people seem to think that once they have clocked in for work they have entered some kind of dystopian dictatorship where all their rights are immediately forfeited. And that people are fundamentally not allowed to push back against this kind of bullshit.

[mulmen]

What right is forfeited? The only reasonable assumption to make is that your boss can read everything. Regardless of if you think it is fair or not it is still the safest assumption.

[BeetleB]

> You’d no longer be able to disent, or discuss anything non-work related with even the slightest expectation of privacy.

When I joined the workforce a long time ago, I went in with the mindset that: Their property, their equipment, their right to monitor (or even keylog).

I was pleasantly surprised to find that not to be the case, but I've always believed in their right to do so.

Why do people expect to have a right to do non-work related stuff on the job? Every company I've worked for states in the employment contract/policies what you can and cannot do on the job. They never enforce it to the extent that they outline in the policies, but it's usually clear cut.

If you want to rant about the company, do it outside the company! Or at a physical water cooler. When coworkers want to rant to me about the company, they don't use Slack/Teams. They message my personal, non-work number.

[Miraste]

While you have the right practical approach, I do believe companies should face harsh regulations preventing this kind of monitoring. It has almost universally negative effects, from enabling union-busting to exploitation to all kinds of discrimination and favoritism.

[wavefunction]

>Why do people expect to have a right to do non-work related stuff on the job?

Like use the restroom? Personally, I'm not a slave. I am getting more and more used to the idea of having to push back on those who do exhibit such a mentality. Y'all are beginning to become a threat to the rest of us.

[gtowey]

Meta: look, you don't have to wear a diaper while you work, but those that do are 87% more likely to get promoted! The choice is yours!

[jbxntuehineoh]

the fact that the employees have voluntarily consented to wearing the diapers means that wearing the diaper is better than any alternative available to them, which proves that forcing employees to wear diapers maximizes total social utility

[zepppotemkin]

It's kind of funny to see how people here are reacting to the world they built when it finally comes to them

[simplyluke]

It's absolutely their right, but it's a dramatic cultural departure from the history of the company.

In the late 2010s/pre-covid it was very common for employees to port their personal cell phone number to their work phone and just not have a personal cell phone. The internal culture at the company was remarkably open for their size.

That all went away by the time I left in 2022, and from what I've heard it has only accelerated into an employee-hostile environment. I'm not shocked at this move.

[reverius42]

What do you think caused the change from being so employee-friendly to so employee-hostile?

[simplyluke]

I won't pretend to be a mind-reader of the executives involved. I was a line engineer, so effectively watching from the sidelines. It was temporally close to Sheryl Sandberg leaving her role as COO, but I have no insights into how much that was a factor, a reaction, or neither.

From my perspective a lot of it was downstream of over-hiring in the post-pandemic frenzy. It's hard to maintain that culture while doing large layoffs, and there's no incentive for them to do so beyond the longer term reality that many of their best employees have left and they're increasingly seen as a place to earn a top paycheck in between layoffs.

[sho_hn]

They were employee-friendly when they wanted to hire. It's been years of layoffs, with another 10% from May onward.

[sho_hn]

Engineers build tools for other people. The profession exists in support of human life. We make the substrate that civilization runs on.

If humans are the point, this also goes for keeping work environments humane.

[andrekandre]

  > The profession exists in support of human life.

it very obviously supports capital and if human life also then its just a side-effect*

*this is just an observation, not a normative claim

[catcowcostume]

> We make the substrate that civilization runs on.

That's a bit self-aggrandizing - especially for Software engineers.

[sho_hn]

I did mean engineers in general (I work with and have great respect for mechanical engineers, for example, and my folks were in construction), but I don't it's necessarily self-aggrandizing, either. I've worked on chat software and know people who met using my software and got married and have kids. I've worked on software somewhere in the chain of publishing important ideas, or just to share a joke.

I don't mean to say that this software was the only means of doing either of these things, of course. But we do make tools that people use regularly when living their lives. Sometimes it's just about being reliable or not getting in the way. The modern equivalent of flintstones and sharing stories around the fire.

It's about taking your work seriously - the qualities of what we make matter - and feeling some sense of purpose. And knowing who you're doing it for. I don't think that's being self-important.

[whateverboat]

1. But they are not paying for your training which you are bringing to the company. 2. About ranting about company, it is difficult to organize. That's why unions existed, and that's why unions were allowed to meet in work hours.

[cyclopeanutopia]

I cannot understand how can anyone hold such outrageously antihuman beliefs.

Governments, corporations and any other organizations should all exist FOR the people, not the other way around.

American-style capitalism truly is a disease.

[BeetleB]

So, you're saying if I work at a factory, I should be able to use the factory equipment to build my stuff?

[pydry]

If you work at the factory you should be able to complain about the boss when he's out of earshot without him snooping.

If that's something he cant handle he might have a problem with personal accountability.

[sgustard]

I've definitely worked places where I used the company Xerox machine to print up 50,000 "Unionize Now" fliers.

[ashley95]

There is no clean separation between personal and work. It is also more efficient to blend them (if I expect a baseline level of non-snoopiness on my work computer, I will text my boyfriend from my work laptop... obviously beneficial for the firm).

Either way when it comes to ranting about the company: many workplaces don't have a watercooler where all your team mates congregate (e.g. remote/different offices). Also what, you'll rant about confidential work projects over non-work texts?

[Frieren]

> When I joined the workforce a long time ago, I went in with the mindset that: Their property, their equipment, their right to monitor (or even keylog).

Why do you renounce to your rights to privacy so easily? You are an employee not a slave, sometimes I have the feeling that Americans do not know the difference.

> If you want to rant about the company, do it outside the company!

You have a right to organize inside the company, and for that the most efficient easy way are the internal company communications. Communications with the purpose of unionizing should be private and the company accessing them should be punished, and if needed C level should go to prison for their crimes.

How do you organize otherwise? How do you contact your colleagues about grievances about the company?

It is mind blowing to see this capitulation on personal rights. It seems that corporate rights are more important than anything else in the USA. It is a pure dystopia.

[miltonlost]

You would love the world of Severance! Drop your humanity and individuality at the door. Become a mindless drone

[satvikpendem]

Fitting username.

[raw_anon_1111]

I don’t care if a company monitors which websites I go to on a work computer, what applications I run or what I say on Slack.

On the other hand I would be looking for another job if they had keyloggers or were taking screenshots even if they said anything about me shopping on Amazon or randomly browsing Hacker News or any website that wasn’t gaming or Netflix during work hours.

Heck I use to travel a lot more for business and I used my work laptop for Netflix and other streaming services in the hotel.

As long as I’m meeting performance standards it shouldn’t matter.

[overfeed]

This comments pairs really well with the song Sixteen Tons - I cued the song[1] and re-read your comment.

More substantively: I would like the employer/employee transaction to be one of buing/selling labor. To me, training AI on keystrokes nudges the deal towards selling one's "soul" next to other dystopian tropes like brain implants and work toilets that analyze excretions.

You are correct that employers own the laptops and can install anything they want, which is why I never do anything other than work there - the farthest I will go is participate in employer-hosted shitpost groups/channels, which are not anonymous, and they are free to train their models on that.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1980WfKC0o

[SecretDreams]

Companies pay their employees to build things. They do not pay their employees for their likeliness or the inner workings of their brains. Meta is trying to get the latter by keystroke tracking. It is an overreach in that context.

If they just want to monitor your computer for the purposes of productivity tracking, that is in their right, imo - just a shitty thing to do.

[barrkel]

You come with a belief, then you wonder why other people don't have the belief. The belief was exogenous for you. Why do you believe the belief is not exogenous for others?

I guess you never talk to coworkers about your weekend. That's on the job. I see you mention the water cooler; how dare you talk there?

[anonymousDan]

What a pathetic quisling attitude to life.