Meta employees are up in arms over a mandatory program to train AI on their

llatein about 3 hours ago 56 commentsRead Article on businessinsider.com

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Discussion (56 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

yodsanklai•about 1 hour ago

People are always keen on criticizing the EU and their regulations, but employees in EU are protected from these kinds of stunts. And also from the upcoming (rumored) layoffs which won't be nearly as cruel.

DoctorDabadedoo•30 minutes ago

Layoffs in EU happen all the same, they are just sprinkled throughout the fiscal year to avoid legal disputes due to the number of people let go.

plufz•18 minutes ago

Obviously it happens but I think you’ll have a hard time arguing that worker rights are as bad in the EU as in the US.

ITUC Global Rights Index (2025)

Europe: 2.78 Nordics: 1.0–1.2 Western Europe: 2.0–2.3

Americas: 3.68 United States: 4

I couldn’t find per state US numbers but the difference is obviously huge.

w4yai•25 minutes ago

> happen all the same

No. They happen, but with a significant difference

raxxorraxor•about 3 hours ago

If you work for meta you shouldn't have a problem with invading the privacy of others.

Of course this is not ok, but you should really quit your job if you have ethical or moral problems with that.

fhennig•23 minutes ago

Of course quitting can be in the cards, but I'd much rather see a successful pushback from meta employees against this new policy; maybe this could be a good cause to form a union over.

newshackr•about 1 hour ago

There isn't exactly a surplus of jobs today. While some may have this option, many do not.

spacechild1•about 1 hour ago

At this point, Meta's opinion on privacy has been widely known for decades. Working for Meta is a personal choice. There is no excuse.

physhster•about 1 hour ago

^ this! Ever since the Cambridge Analytica scandal, people who decide to work there make the statement that they are ok with it. Same with Palantir, X, Grok, Tesla etc

glimshe•32 minutes ago

Poor Meta employees. They are victims of the oppressive job market and are left no other option than to work for 100s of thousands of dollars per year in well-lit and comfortable offices with free food and premium healthcare.

Peritract•about 1 hour ago

That argument doesn't really fly for some of the most highly paid people in the world with at least one really big name on their CVs.

Everyone working at Meta has more options than almost anyone else.

hirako2000•about 1 hour ago

That's a good point. The crux is privacy or half your salary.

none2585•about 1 hour ago

Eh - if you have Meta on your resume it's not that tough out there right now.

dccoolgai•42 minutes ago

TBH if I see "late Meta" or "post-Musk Twitter/X" on a resume it gets filed as "low morals / low trust".

ForHackernews•about 1 hour ago

Anyone working for Meta could have chosen to work elsewhere. You have other options (that might not pay $350 grand, but hey, that's the price of your soul)

ludicrousdispla•about 1 hour ago

> The post says the software is limited to a list of commonly used work applications, like Gmail, GChat, and Metamate, an AI assistant for employees.

> It also says it only applies to computers, not to employees' phones.

What a great motivator for employees to stop using their work computers.

Mordisquitos•39 minutes ago

What a relief that it only applies to when they're using their computers! At first I thought it applied to all work at their desks: paperwork, typing, phonecalls, etc. That would have been crazy.

Does anyone know how many Meta employees use a computer, and what fraction of their work they do on it? It cannot be that much, surely.

codeulike•about 1 hour ago

Is this like a game where we choose the next word?

Meta employees are up in arms over a mandatory program to train AI on their _______

Pets?

Hairstyles?

heresie-dabord•12 minutes ago

> Meta employees are up in arms over a mandatory program to train AI on their...

tolerance for abuse.

Havoc•27 minutes ago

Cunning plan to collect more LLM training data ;)

nnx•about 1 hour ago

Coincidentally this is how pretraining works :)

super256•about 1 hour ago

80 characters limit in the title.

ceejayoz•about 1 hour ago

Yeah, but usually folks tweak to paraphrase, instead of lopping off.

I'd have gone with "Meta employees up in arms over mandatory program to train AI on their keystrokes".

xnorswap•about 1 hour ago

You can squeeze it into half that length with, "Meta staff fury at Big Brother AI scheme"

chrisjj•35 minutes ago

Bathroom usage.

dist-epoch•about 1 hour ago

TikTok videos

TacticalCoder•about 1 hour ago

I thought it was "arms"? Although I take it that then the sentence should have ended with "theirs" and not "their"?

yubblegum•about 1 hour ago

Oddly enough was watching Colossus: The Forbin Project. One of those mid 70s scifi flicks. At some point, their AI demanded that its creator be under 24/7 audio-visiual surveillance (including bathroom time, yes).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus:_The_Forbin_Project

p.s. was just reading the wiki plot summary and lol'ing at this bit: "Colossus has the responsible programmers summarily executed outside their workplace, left laying 24 hours, and cremated. Colossus also names their replacements. " -- karma is a bitch, indeed.

notabotiswear•about 1 hour ago

>"This makes me super uncomfortable. How do we opt out?"

Karma’s a b*tch, innit?

thedevilslawyer•about 1 hour ago

A better reply would have been:

> "This makes me super uncomfortable. How do we opt out?"

>> Opt-out is as simple as sending in your resignation to your manager.

dist-epoch•about 1 hour ago

Typical Meta employee:

> I can't hear you over the sound of the millions I'm making at Meta.

anygivnthursday•about 1 hour ago

This is just v1, next release might add eye movement, pulse and brain wave tracking to train ZuckNet.

pluc•about 1 hour ago

So they do treat their employees like their users

throw0101a•about 1 hour ago

Now over ten years old (2015-10-16):

> 'I never thought leopards would eat MY face,' sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party.

* https://twitter.com/Cavalorn/status/654934442549620736

Havoc•22 minutes ago

Very little sympathy frankly.

Half the big tech world is economically built on mass scale invasive unwanted tracking & adtech. If it goes up in flames from internal tension about invasive tracking that's just karma

spacechild1•about 1 hour ago

Nice. Let them taste some of their own medicine.

keybored•about 2 hours ago

I don’t care about Schadenfreude. It’s good that they are making a stink.

I would bang my head against the wall if they either didn’t make a stink or publicly said that, of course the Company is going to monitor me, it’s their hardware[1] and who am I to be anything but a vessel for my employer on Company time etc.

[1] As seen in the comments on the large thread about this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47851948

thedevilslawyer•about 1 hour ago

Schadenfreude is exactly what's needed here. The rallying words can be for another set of people/org.

zelphirkalt•about 1 hour ago

You are (hopefully) a human being firstly, and only in some later capacity "a vessel for my employer on Company time". It would do the world some good, if more people remembered, that they are working with people and their decisions affect people.

keybored•about 1 hour ago

Speaking about Meta employees. There was this anecdote from a month ago:

> very few facebook employees use their products outside of testing, which is a big contributor to that fear - they just can't believe that there are billions of people who would continue to use apps to post what they had for lunch!

> And as a result of that lack of faith, most of them believe that Meta is a bubble and can burst at any point. Consequently, everyone works for the next performance review cycle, and most are just in rush to capture as much money as they could before that bubble bursts.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47409649

chrisjj•40 minutes ago

Required reading: The Circle by Dave Eggers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circle_(Eggers_novel)

LightBug1•about 1 hour ago

The most exquisite form of karma.

shevy-java•about 2 hours ago

It is in a way some kind of modern day slavery. Of course they can always decide to quit, but what if the next company uses the same sniffing strategy? On youtube you can see video clips of indians wearing various glasses to monitor their own manual work procedures. AI has truly become our new overlord, controlled by a few huge companies.

nicman23•about 1 hour ago

lol what. you are getting paying it is not slavery

zelphirkalt•about 1 hour ago

Some people are forced to work in places, which are dehumanizing through work conditions, whether you get paid for it or not doesn't necessarily tell you much. Of course this is not the case for Mete employees, who should have an easy time finding other employment. But these trends are not limited to Meta. They might find application in some shithole of a badly paid job somewhere, where people have only the choice between living poorly in some slums, or serving their local tech overlord.

vortegne•about 2 hours ago

Small-scale imperial boomerang. You thought that you're building a privacy-destroying machine and this machine will never destroy _your_ privacy?

At some point in the future, a lot of the SV techbros will be hopefully viewed as ghouls with no morals or ethics. This is not a subsection of humanity that should be dictating anything and yet they always do. If you complain about this and don't quit your job at Meta, you're failing an extremely basic check.

zelphirkalt•about 1 hour ago

> At some point in the future, a lot of the SV techbros will be hopefully viewed as ghouls with no morals or ethics. This is not a subsection of humanity that should be dictating anything and yet they always do. If you complain about this and don't quit your job at Meta, you're failing an extremely basic check.

I hope you are right, though it will still take a long time, if it ever happens. The base premises of most people is still something along the lines of: Has money -> must be successful -> is smarter than most -> is right and cannot be wrong.

This kind of shortcircuited thinking is superbly annoying and harms us and the planet and every living being on it. I still remember clearly, when I explained to a Facebook fanperson, that FB is a criminal organization, just after they had to pay the highest fines ever for violating people's privacy. Despite the plain facts in front of them they chose not to believe me, because who am I, right? Just an IT person, who cannot possibly know shit, since I am not as rich and famous as Zucky the android.

gamerslexus•about 1 hour ago

> This is not a subsection of humanity that should be dictating anything and yet they always do.

Interesting phrasing. So which subsection of humanity you think should be dictating something?

Is there a reason you didn't go with

> No subsection of humanity should be dictating anything and yet these techbros always do.

rootlocus•about 1 hour ago

With all due respect to the guidelines that requires assuming good faith, this sounds like the beginning of a nirvana fallacy.

You don't have to provide a perfect solution to point out something is wrong. People who don't care about the people they lead don't make good leaders. I'd rather have leaders who hurt others by accident than on purpose.

ceejayoz•about 1 hour ago

> So which subsection of humanity you think should be dictating something?

"Here's your shit sandwich."

"I don't want a shit sandwich!"

I don't have to know what I do want to eat to decline the shit sandwich.

gamerslexus•25 minutes ago

The shit sandwich is the sneaky idea that any "subsection of humanity" should dictate anything. Weirdly it's always a subsection that the speaker happens to be in or be friends with. I don't know about you but I know I don't want that shit sandwich.

compass_copium•about 1 hour ago

The proletariat, of course.

andrewstuart•about 2 hours ago

The company is run by lizards in hoodies.

loloquwowndueo•about 1 hour ago

Now now don’t be mean to lizards