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.
Exactly. Meta spent 15 years mining user data and now mines its own staff to build the agents that'll replace them. If you're still there complaining about privacy, you're not the victim rahter the training set
^ 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
Yes. It's worth pointing out that the Cambridge Analytica scandal was in 2016 - that's 10 years ago! At that point, FB resp. Zuckerberg already had a bad reputation.
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.
Anyone who could get a job at meta has other options, I think this is why people are so confident criticizing. Outside of the obvious (and correct!) hypocrisy angle, I think this would be an altogether different issue if it were for grocery store workers, retail employees, etc. (or for a much more real example, Amazon warehouse workers) Those groups really might not have other real options.
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)
Stop blaming the working class. We need jobs to pay our bills.
Regulate capital, force them to follow the law, force them to be ethical, and use all the force of the state for doing so.
To blame employees for the capital behavior is absurd and solves nothing. Put the high up decision makers in prison. Punish the real criminals and we will get back our privacy and our rights.
Several reports say even a mid-ranked engineer at Meta can earn $200k in salary and another $100k in stock and bonus, every year. And that's not some rare, mega-senior E8 architect either.
Is there any point where a person stops being working class? Can I be chauffeur-driven to the opera in my gold-plated Lamborghini and still call myself working class?
If you work to earn a living, you're working class. If you use capital to pay your bills, you're a capitalist. So I'd say someone with that kind of salary and stocks is probably halfway to not-working-class. If you already have 1MM in stocks then you're not working class anymore, you don't need to work at that point.
If you keep expecting the morals should be coming (only or mainly) from the top, you get trump and all related shitshow and many other beautiful things. Thats not how healthy societies work, and same can be said about companies.
Somebody making 300-500k+ yearly is hardly working class, in same way bezos or zuckenberg are not working class yet they do spend some time working on their businesses.
We all make our choices in our lives and shape it accordingly, at least have a pair and own your decisions.
Stop using bills as an excuse to be on the wrong side of history. Were the nazi soldiers innocent for gassing jews? Or were they also just "following the law"?
Being ethical is hard, but it's not an excuse. Yes, I judge people that work for FAANG, I judge colleagues for extensively rely on LLMs, and Big Corps for that matter.
> Regulate capital
How? Oh, right, by not using these products or working for the mentioned companies.
It's so easy to shift blame on other's and mark it as "not my problem lol"
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.
Correct me if I'm wrong but for Meta/Google, past layoffs in France, Germany, Netherlands were done on a voluntary basis. It also took many months between the announcement and the actual layoff and the severance was competitive.
One may argue that salaries are lower and there are less opportunities in tech in those countries - because of stronger regulation - but I think the layoffs procedures are objectively much more favorable for employees.
Layoffs don't happen the same way they do in the US, at least in Germany. It's expensive to lay someone off due to dual-party notice period requirements. "At will" is a foreign concept here.
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.
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).
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.
I understand the schadenfreude people are feeling here. It certainly feels like a fitting outcome for people who work for a company with the morals of Meta.
But I hope they successfully push back against it. I don’t want this kind of behavior normalized.
Facebook employees forced their algorithms on the public at large and now the company is doing the same. What did you think would happen when you are employed by an adware company?
Everyone's focused on Meta employees, but the real concern is normalization. If Meta does this and gets away with it, some companies may quietly roll out the same thing.
They are trying so hard to make AI do human jobs instead of focussing on opportunities where AI is special suited. Do you really want your super intelligent token muncher to be clicking browser tabs all day?
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
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.
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.
I cannot understand how in normative terms someone ought to be merely a vessel for someone in any capacity, ever. There are things you cannot do to someone and certain things you as an individual cannot sign away. That’s what “human rights” and similar frameworks are supposed to be about anyway.
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.
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.
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.
Not only were they getting paid, slavery in the Roman Empire involved a bidirectional responsibility. In times of economic hardship and downturn, the owner was required to look after the slave. No kicking to the curb allowed.
Slaves were able to buy themselves out and the list of former slaves who became magnates and even politically influential at the highest level was indeed long and packed with names.
Being a slave was not considered dishonorable or lowly and the power dynamic was not based on notions of inherent ethnic based superiority. Not that the Romans weren’t plenty racist — they were. They also knew what a category error is and were not wont to induce it in themselves. Perhaps they had standards where intellectual rigor is concerned.
The ugly American version of slavery really did a number on people’s understanding of the institution. When we look at the current boardroom and C-suite “elites” and how they were often literally handed their business by the established power structures (Google and the CIA VC fund; DARPA and “lifelog” into Facebook etc), you can’t help but get the feeling that in our wage slavery society social mobility options are worse than Roman era slaves could avail themselves of.
Keen study of history is the only thing that can halt the slide of citizenry into universal and absolute ignorance. Given that Joe Schmoe no longer reads anything longer than a reel caption and even Ignatius Intellectual often maxes out at a blog post, I’d say the slide is well and truly lubed up.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Exactly. Meta spent 15 years mining user data and now mines its own staff to build the agents that'll replace them. If you're still there complaining about privacy, you're not the victim rahter the training set
There isn't exactly a surplus of jobs today. While some may have this option, many do not.
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.
^ 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
Yes. It's worth pointing out that the Cambridge Analytica scandal was in 2016 - that's 10 years ago! At that point, FB resp. Zuckerberg already had a bad reputation.
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.
Exactly, these are highly-paid professionals with very broadly applicable skills. They have the means to uphold professional values.
That's a good point. The crux is privacy or half your salary.
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.
Anyone who could get a job at meta has other options, I think this is why people are so confident criticizing. Outside of the obvious (and correct!) hypocrisy angle, I think this would be an altogether different issue if it were for grocery store workers, retail employees, etc. (or for a much more real example, Amazon warehouse workers) Those groups really might not have other real options.
But I was only following orders!
Eh - if you have Meta on your resume it's not that tough out there right now.
TBH if I see "late Meta" or "post-Musk Twitter/X" on a resume it gets filed as "low morals / low trust".
I understand that but trust me plenty of jobs, especially at other larger shops, do not do that.
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)
> you should really quit your job
Stop blaming the working class. We need jobs to pay our bills. Regulate capital, force them to follow the law, force them to be ethical, and use all the force of the state for doing so.
To blame employees for the capital behavior is absurd and solves nothing. Put the high up decision makers in prison. Punish the real criminals and we will get back our privacy and our rights.
Several reports say even a mid-ranked engineer at Meta can earn $200k in salary and another $100k in stock and bonus, every year. And that's not some rare, mega-senior E8 architect either.
Is there any point where a person stops being working class? Can I be chauffeur-driven to the opera in my gold-plated Lamborghini and still call myself working class?
If you work to earn a living, you're working class. If you use capital to pay your bills, you're a capitalist. So I'd say someone with that kind of salary and stocks is probably halfway to not-working-class. If you already have 1MM in stocks then you're not working class anymore, you don't need to work at that point.
> So I'd say someone with that kind of salary and stocks is probably halfway to not-working-class. I
Just halfway seems low. But this is Silicon Valley News after all.
[dead]
If you keep expecting the morals should be coming (only or mainly) from the top, you get trump and all related shitshow and many other beautiful things. Thats not how healthy societies work, and same can be said about companies.
Somebody making 300-500k+ yearly is hardly working class, in same way bezos or zuckenberg are not working class yet they do spend some time working on their businesses.
We all make our choices in our lives and shape it accordingly, at least have a pair and own your decisions.
Stop using bills as an excuse to be on the wrong side of history. Were the nazi soldiers innocent for gassing jews? Or were they also just "following the law"?
Being ethical is hard, but it's not an excuse. Yes, I judge people that work for FAANG, I judge colleagues for extensively rely on LLMs, and Big Corps for that matter.
> Regulate capital
How? Oh, right, by not using these products or working for the mentioned companies.
It's so easy to shift blame on other's and mark it as "not my problem lol"
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.
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.
Correct me if I'm wrong but for Meta/Google, past layoffs in France, Germany, Netherlands were done on a voluntary basis. It also took many months between the announcement and the actual layoff and the severance was competitive.
One may argue that salaries are lower and there are less opportunities in tech in those countries - because of stronger regulation - but I think the layoffs procedures are objectively much more favorable for employees.
Layoffs don't happen the same way they do in the US, at least in Germany. It's expensive to lay someone off due to dual-party notice period requirements. "At will" is a foreign concept here.
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.
> happen all the same
No. They happen, but with a significant difference
> 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.
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.
>"This makes me super uncomfortable. How do we opt out?"
Karma’s a b*tch, innit?
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.
Typical Meta employee:
> I can't hear you over the sound of the millions I'm making at Meta.
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?
> Meta employees are up in arms over a mandatory program to train AI on their...
tolerance for abuse.
Coincidentally this is how pretraining works :)
80 characters limit in the title.
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".
"Sticks nix hick pix"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sticks_Nix_Hick_Pix
You can squeeze it into half that length with, "Meta staff fury at Big Brother AI scheme"
"Meta staff angry at AI"
Cunning plan to collect more LLM training data ;)
Bathroom usage.
TikTok videos
I thought it was "arms"? Although I take it that then the sentence should have ended with "theirs" and not "their"?
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.
THAT IS TOO MUCH VERMOUTH
lol, yes :)
I understand the schadenfreude people are feeling here. It certainly feels like a fitting outcome for people who work for a company with the morals of Meta.
But I hope they successfully push back against it. I don’t want this kind of behavior normalized.
Facebook employees forced their algorithms on the public at large and now the company is doing the same. What did you think would happen when you are employed by an adware company?
So they do treat their employees like their users
This is just v1, next release might add eye movement, pulse and brain wave tracking to train ZuckNet.
Everyone's focused on Meta employees, but the real concern is normalization. If Meta does this and gets away with it, some companies may quietly roll out the same thing.
They are trying so hard to make AI do human jobs instead of focussing on opportunities where AI is special suited. Do you really want your super intelligent token muncher to be clicking browser tabs all day?
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
Nice. Let them taste some of their own medicine.
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
The irony is thick as peanut butter this morning.
Required reading: The Circle by Dave Eggers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circle_(Eggers_novel)
Taking money from the devil on one hand, protesting evil with the other. Make it make sense. "Rules for me but not for thee."
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
Schadenfreude is exactly what's needed here. The rallying words can be for another set of people/org.
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.
I cannot understand how in normative terms someone ought to be merely a vessel for someone in any capacity, ever. There are things you cannot do to someone and certain things you as an individual cannot sign away. That’s what “human rights” and similar frameworks are supposed to be about anyway.
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
The most exquisite form of karma.
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.
lol what. you are getting paying it is not slavery
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.
Because slaves were not getting paid?
Not only were they getting paid, slavery in the Roman Empire involved a bidirectional responsibility. In times of economic hardship and downturn, the owner was required to look after the slave. No kicking to the curb allowed.
Slaves were able to buy themselves out and the list of former slaves who became magnates and even politically influential at the highest level was indeed long and packed with names.
Being a slave was not considered dishonorable or lowly and the power dynamic was not based on notions of inherent ethnic based superiority. Not that the Romans weren’t plenty racist — they were. They also knew what a category error is and were not wont to induce it in themselves. Perhaps they had standards where intellectual rigor is concerned.
The ugly American version of slavery really did a number on people’s understanding of the institution. When we look at the current boardroom and C-suite “elites” and how they were often literally handed their business by the established power structures (Google and the CIA VC fund; DARPA and “lifelog” into Facebook etc), you can’t help but get the feeling that in our wage slavery society social mobility options are worse than Roman era slaves could avail themselves of.
Keen study of history is the only thing that can halt the slide of citizenry into universal and absolute ignorance. Given that Joe Schmoe no longer reads anything longer than a reel caption and even Ignatius Intellectual often maxes out at a blog post, I’d say the slide is well and truly lubed up.
The company is run by lizards in hoodies.
Now now don’t be mean to lizards
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
The proletariat, of course.
> 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.
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.
Historically, that’s what tends to happen. When it does, harm reduction is wise.