Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has been forced to pause a company-wide program that tracked workers’ keystrokes, mouse clicks and computer screen content after a revolt by employees who signed a petition condemning the tool as a violation of privacy and trust.
The programme, called the Model Capability Initiative (MCI), was launched just two months ago to collect data for training artificial intelligence models. But it was met with immediate anger from staff who discovered that their every online action at work was being recorded and stored.
“Meta pauses employee tracking program after nearly 2,000 workers sign petition citing privacy and trust violations.”
More than 1,600 Meta workers signed a petition demanding the company stop harvesting “employee ‘computer use’ data”, warning that “collecting and repurposing this kind of data raises serious concerns around privacy, consent, and trust in the workplace”. The figure was reported as nearly 2,000 by the BBC.
Meta halted the programme on Monday after realizing that some of the collected data had been left potentially accessible to anyone inside the company. The tech publication Wired reported that an internal security notice referred to the exposure of data tables including “full prompts and transcriptions, private conversations, people and performance data”.
“We have carefully designed this program with privacy safeguards and while we have no indication at this time that any data was improperly accessed by Meta employees, we’re pausing it while we investigate,” a Meta spokesman said.
The pause follows weeks of blowback from workers. In an initial attempt at damage control, Meta had said employees could opt out of tracking for up to 30 minutes at a time. But one current employee told the BBC that was “just an attempt at damage control”. Another employee said the fact that tracking “was forced on us, there was no consent” left people angry. “I’ve never seen morale here so bad,” the employee added.
Zuckerberg, Meta’s founder and chief executive, had told employees that AI models learn from “watching really smart people do things”, according to an account of an internal company meeting. “The average intelligence of the people who are at this company is significantly higher than the average set of people that you can get to do tasks,” he said, arguing that the coding skills of Meta engineers would dramatically improve a model’s coding abilities.
But the tracking programme is only one source of internal frustration. Meta has conducted extensive layoffs and reorganised many employees around AI initiatives, on which the company is spending up to $145bn (£109bn) this year alone. Employees have openly insulted management using explicit language in an internal meeting on the AI-driven changes, according to Wired.
“The direction this company is going in is depressing,” a former employee who recently left Meta after several years said. “Exhausting and depressing.”
Meanwhile, the New York Times reported that Zuckerberg recently ordered a small team to create a smartphone app similar to prediction market sites Polymarket and Kalshi, which allow users to place wagers on events ranging from Tony award winners to the Iran conflict. About $24bn in wagers are placed each month on those two platforms, according to the Pew Research Centre.