Meta to start capturing employee mouse movements, keystrokes for AI training

The legal environment is the only way to baseline behavior. In countries with strong worker's rights, you generally don't have to fight much to make use of them; it's the norm for management, too. Likewise, the US-style norm of having no expectations toward your employer and the "stay in your lane" type takes rampant in the thread are also symptoms of the environment and its norms.

Companies have shown us that IP going to AI providers is acceptable. Once you cross that line your thought workers are assets not people.

Feel like I'm reading a Gibson novel here.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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?

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

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

American-style capitalism truly is a disease.

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

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.

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.

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

It’s only once the business is having a cash crunch or will no longer need to hire competitive candidates that they start letting people go without severance.

Imagine in 300 years we are still ruled by zuck, ellison, bezos, musk, thiel, et al, just in ai model form empowered by estates worth more than entire nations and legal protections designed to outlast heat death of the universe. Assuming there is still a "we" living on earth. Charitable assumption I guess.

That said -- social media websites were later removed from the "work-related" list. So there was at least some recognition it was overreach and did not match the stated justification.

I’m surprised this needs to be said out loud.

unless you're in a jurisdiction that has anti-surveillance workplace laws, which if you don't should probably think about before Mark Zuckerberg gets the idea to monitor to your body temperature from below the waistline

Since this is a serious website: I'd be genuinely curious how mouse velocity and trajectories differ between cultural and environmental settings (apart from hardware, that's boring and should be normalized).

There was a time when studies made headlines that were exactly about the relationship between mouse movement, typing etc, and psychiatric disorders as well as physical health.

Obviously, both are related.

If you ask me, Ad tech would probably be able to tell your denominated faith using this data, when there's enough of it...