And “After Meta announced late last month that it would start monitoring employee computer usage, hundreds of employees spoke out.” One employee even told Meta’s CTO in an internal post: “Your indifference to your employees’ concerns is troubling.”
In an internal post last month, Meta told its US employees it was making a change that would affect tens of thousands of them. What employees typed on their computers, how they moved their mouse, where they clicked and what they saw on their screens would be tracked.
The goal, the company said, was to record employee data so Meta's artificial intelligence models could learn "how people actually complete everyday tasks using computers."
Many employees were outraged. In online comments, they denounced the tracking as a privacy violation, calling it antisocial and insensitive… One engineering manager even asked, “How can we opt out?” “There’s no option to opt out of your company laptop,” replied Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief technology officer.
Employees reacted by posting more than 100 angry and surprised emojis, according to the messages….
Meta is pushing its 78.000 employees to adopt AI tools and factor the technology’s use into performance reviews. The company is also tracking workers’ work on computers to feed and train its AI models. It is cutting jobs to offset its AI spending, saying last month it would cut 10% of its workforce.
That has led to anger and anxiety as workers await news about whether they will be affected by the layoffs, which are scheduled to take place on May 20, according to 11 current and former Meta employees.
Some said they no longer see Meta as a place for a long career. Others are looking for new jobs or trying to show they want to be fired so they can get severance pay, current and former employees said. “It’s incredibly disheartening,” wrote an employee who conducts user research in an internal post, which was seen by New York Times
Meta also introduced internal dashboards to track employees’ consumption of “tokens,” a unit of artificial intelligence usage. Some said the dashboards were a pressure tactic to encourage competition with colleagues. This led some employees to create so many AI agents that others had to introduce agents to find agents and agents to evaluate agents, two of the people said.
Although the press releases will range from very select to rare, I said I'd pass...because sometimes the editors hide.
