> Meta, the company built on watching everything its billions of users do online so it can keep them clicking on ragebait and targeted ads
I realize this doesn't really help this conversation but that's all I can think of whenever this kind of subject comes up.
> helps you achieve your goals, create what you want to see in the world, experience any adventure, be a better friend to those you care about, and grow to become the person you aspire to be.
… If you vote for me, all of your wildest dreams will come true. Thank you.
https://www.itnews.com.au/news/meta-to-start-capturing-emplo...
https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-new-ai-tool-tracks-staf...
If you want to be real for a minute, we all lived through the freedom of Covid WFH. We all did dishes and billed for it. We all told ourselves 'I needed a break, it helps me think about the problem'. (And that was true, one day I was stuck on an 8 queens problem and I ran a half marathon, when I finished I had the solution)
But... common everyone... we are humans. We take the path of least resistance.
Does anyone waste money or time on things that dont matter intentionally? If I'm making 200k a year with 0 output, I'll probably work on something else in the meantime.
If I'm in office, I don't think I need surveillance, I'm on the clock and its my manager's job to supervise. WFH? I get it.
This idea is as old as the panopticon, and Michel Foucault talks about this as well.
As I get older and run my own company, I find my juniors and seniors need to be supervised. My mid-levels are fine. Juniors dont know when to ask for help. Seniors are complacent. Mid-levels seem to have something to prove.
Can labor make a deal with management? I'll give you WFH for surveillance software.
I've been seeing it more and more these days. People do it for programmers as a whole too, or scientists. Concerns about job market layoffs due to ai dismissed with "Programmers surprised as leopards eat their own face" as though dave who does the database at your local high school is responsible in even some small sense for the effects of AI in society.
There are actual people responsible for these problems. People who are not programmers. Who have far less in common with you or me than we both do with some random backend engineer at meta.
Those SW devs probably think that doing a deal with the devil in exchange for a higher than average income now, will allow them to build an upper class lifestyle where they'll be safe from the government's jackboots, but news flash, NO you won't, unless you're part of the insider-trading presidential Epstein Island elite pedo-class, you're also on the menu.
Zuckerberg, Gates, Karp, Thiel, all have self sustaining doomsday bunkers on private islands, to escape the societal fallout of their actions. Do you?
Every employment contract I’ve signed has included language that makes it clear that whatever I do on corporate time, on the corporate net, on corporate devices, is corporate property. This is why I never mix corp and personal data on my phone or join my phone to their WiFi.
Is it just the AI training angle that makes this newsworthy?
> .. so it can keep them clicking on ragebait ..
Have people lost their spine? seriously, quit your job. this is insane. why are americans putting up with this bullshit?
That's an interesting phrase. Yes, working from home comes with more freedom over your day than working in an office. During the pandemic, though, it was largely forced as we were told you can't go to the office, or the beach, or the gym, etc. That wasn't really freedom as much as a house arrest sentence.
The key here, though, is that Meta is at least claiming to be doing this to train AI not to spy on how efficient or compliant their WFH employees are.
Surveillance = lack of trust and poor understanding of what counts as productivity. Essentially it's a great indicator of poor management.
In the future, hopefully we can use Neuralink-like technology to quantify worker compliance and cut the wasteful sludge that want to “rest and vest” at the expense of the honest and hard working executives.
Why are your seniors not unblocking your juniors? And if your seniors are complacent maybe they just need a good challenge.
No human should be surveilled on work. And if you're going to have surveillance on me, then I want surveillance on you. Would you be fine with that?
I don't think intellectual work is an always on hands on keyboard task. When in the office there's plenty of extended water cooler conversations or non work related conversations at work stations. Indeed I've often seen these cited as reasons for RTO.
No it isn’t. The fault with your logic is that you assume people work because they’re supervised.
We can separate it out. The things at Meta that had no staff working on them can be blamed on the corporation, and the rest can be blamed on the people working to enable it.
Some people may have refused to do these things - you just aren't aware of them. It's unrealistic though to think that in a globalized world, individuals would share the same ethics and/or intelligence.
Half the people on HN want to be the billionaires who are chummy with Zuck, Musk, etc
Temporarily embarrassed millionaires are one thing, but the last 15 years has shown that many American tech workers can get a small slice of the enourmous wealth.
When you've got $10m in assets, even if they return just 1% you are still getting more money than the average worker, at $100k a year.
However someone with $10b in assets is so far beyond you it's crazy. At 1% they are growing at $270k a day.
Actual growth is more like 10% than 1%. The wealthy make millions a day, and still want more. You can't spend that much no matter how much your gluttonous lifestyle is, not without significantly trampling on others.
Millionaires aren't like that, they're just free from financial concerns.
Nobody is forcing you to work there.
But how did that turn out for Ghislaine Maxwell though? We aren't seeing her much in the posh NYC parties anymore are we?
And something also has to be said about public shame when sentences like: "Bill Gates got even more STDs than Windows got viruses and that lead to his wife quitting him".
I'd rather be a small millionaire than a billionaire having to suffer headlines like that.
Some level of sacrifice is required when you feel super uncomfortable at work in the US. I get the arguments of "I can't lose my pay", but at the same time, if you aren't aligned with how they treat you now, what do you think they will be doing with that data? What does 1 year from now look like? 2 years? Do you think it will be less invasive? Or will they be tracking your eye movements as well, facial sentiment?
I don't know why, but it's endemic. You have ICE, quite literally purchasing your surveillance data so they can sweep people off the streets. But getting people to delete some apps? It's effectively impossible. However you feel about the ICE issue, and future government program could deem you the enemy. And your data is out there just waiting to be weaponized against you. But will people actually do anything about it? Delete their apps? Stop using a smartphone? Write their congressman? Nope, nope, nope, and nope. They will complain online a bit and otherwise change _no_ behavior. The only positive movement I've seen in this regard is people moving away from flock. Otherwise, people are tripping over themselves to allow surveillance into their lives.
It’s the same defeatist attitude people who get an extra three months of pay to train their Eastern European or Indian replacements.
They will gladly take the three months pay to train a replacement. I’d quit on the spot. Let them figure it out.
> why are americans putting up with this bullshit?
For 5 years everyone was happy, but I kind of knew what I was doing was wrong.
Not that I think I could have automated $16M/yr, but I def knew I was billing for doing dishes.
But most of the people working in technology positions at Meta and Facebook are not in that sort of position, they're usually well paid already, and could easily change jobs if they had a tiny bit of spine and could sacrifice getting paid less. Internally they'll reason and justify why they can't just leave, but from the outside it's embarrassingly obvious they don't really care in the end.
Meanwhile other Epstein Island clients like Howard Lutnick are sitting next to the president right now(himself a client), and former client Bill Clinton used to be president, and their families amassed generational wealth, security and political influence that no mere mortal will ever be able to have no matter how hard they work. There's no justice here.
You have to understand, this hypothetical guy has never met zuck. He's quite possibly never met anyone who has never met zuck. He may well not live in america.
The job market for programmers is not good right now. Estimates put average time in unemployment at 12+ months. Would you inflict this on your family? Because a different part of the giant company you work at did bad stuff? people you've never met, working on a product you've never worked on, did bad stuff? as opposed to all the other extremely moral giant companies you could be working for?
This is, of course, oversimplified. Dave was probably laid off months ago anyway. Was he in some sense responsible for his own redundancy?
I understand the feeling that we have to be able to pin some portion of blame or responsibility on companies. They are often able to launder responsibility through their sheer size, and their byzantine processes. But there are real people responsible for setting strategy! the people at the bottom do sometimes resign out of protest at immoral actions! but it has to be pretty naked to come to that. There are literally management strategy books about how to build departments to avoid workers realizing the purpose of their work so you can get them to do things they disagree with.
The workers would arm up with shotguns, rifles, Molotov cocktails. They'd then go to the bosses' house and have a "chat". If they didn't listen, they'd have their house shot up or burned to the ground.
It was the very bosses that hired Pinkerton's to go murder the union leaders as well.
Some of the railroad unionization got so bloody and violent that even the US military got in on the action, in favor of companies.
In the end, we got the NLRB and a whole host of rights. The violence did indeed work, but saying that is somehow breaking unforgivable speech.
And if violence isnt up to these meta engineers, perhaps they should look into CIA's own simple sabotage field manual techniques.
Hopefully you aren't one of those "well I signed the contract that let me be abused, I have no right to complain about my material conditions" kind of people. Under zero circumstances will your employer ever show you that level of empathy towards you, your coworkers, and your families. Under zero circumstances do they 'earn' your moral compass.
I get that you (and most of them) want to cash the checks without feeling responsible. Tough. People make the choice to work there, and they make the choice every day to keep working there. Other people get to make choices too, including about how they think about, describe, and treat people who profit from harming others.
Freedom of speech and freedom of action does not include freedom from consequences. Your freedom, or that of people making bank at Meta, is not more important than anybody else's freedom.
So what if she's a woman? You think women can't be evil to commit heinous crimes or what?
>she's the only person to have been put in jail over this whole "powerful men abusing women" situation.
Well she's was the one responsible for finding and pimping out underage girls to those "powerful men" meaning she's the one to get caught red handed and receive sentencing. Those "powerful men" on that island weren't caught red handed, they were just mentioned in the files which isn't enough of strong evidence to slam dunk jail someone on the spot like Maxwell.
I would argue the organizational tricks exist more for the benefit of the worker than the org itself. The “powerless software engineers” there wanted the excuse to accept the huge salary for very easy work. The organizational tricks don’t fool anyone it’s a favor to the workers at these companies. They exist specifically to ease the cognitive dissonance just enough continue doing your job so you can get paid as much as you want without having to take guilt home with you. I’d say the same is true of my friends in the aerospace defense world. Do you really think they can’t put two and two together and understand that their “flight stabilization module” isn’t going to be used to blow up some school in another country?Your argument is just giving these people the ease of conscious which they want.
On the decision front as well I’d say most of the actual decisions in my org were not actually being made by C-Suite level or even executives. The managerial class at these companies are playing a totally different game than engineers. All the managers care about is that they have good metrics to show their boss so they can get promoted before the person on their sister team. I didn’t interact with a single person above VP and on my projects (as a recent grad mind you) I couldn’t even get my product manager to make a decision on how my product should be implemented. Everyone in the managerial class in these large companies largely exists to provide the illusion that you have no power. Meanwhile they have no idea what anyone in their org is actually working on and as long as they get a nice number to show their boss at the end of the quarter they won’t bother looking too closely.
I think we’re going to have a reckoning in the near future where we’re going to have to come to terms with the fact that the surveillance state which we’re scared of has been designed and built by the “powerless” engineers. The world is too complex for executives to actually have any understanding of what’s being done beneath them. There is SO MUCH room for the average engineer to shape their work in a more positive direction but that would actually require taking ownership over their work and risk some mental connection to its implementation. The average big tech employee already exists on the precipice of too much cognitive dissonance so they can’t afford to try and change anything otherwise they’d be convinced to give up their mid 6 figure salary while already having a larger net worth than 99% of the world will achieve in their lifetime. You cannot equate the life of a software engineer at a large company with the struggle of the working class in any meaningful way. Having a large mortgage is not at all similar to living paycheck to paycheck with variable hours at multiple jobs.
I’m being a bit brutal here I know but I’m so tired of people making excuses for themselves and others for living a life devoid of responsibility. If what I’m saying has struck a chord with anyone who is in a similar spot as I was, I’d suggest strongly questioning your position in the world. I have since found a different career path where I have clear ownership over my work and direction and am much happier now. I’m not fixing the world or anything and took a huge paycut but I agree with the outcome of job and am actually willing to work hard without resentment. I also applaud those who fight against the indifference of their coworkers in these companies since I know they exist. If every worker took responsibility for their output I promise you the parasitic Google or Meta as we know it would not exist. We are not the victims here. If we were desperate coal miners, I’d agree with you, but we are a class of workers with a level of financial flexibility, education, and freedom in our work most of the world has never been able to dream of. The success of these companies exists in how much responsibility they can put in the hands of their engineers who ultimately make most of the meaningful decisions whether they’re willing to admit it or not.
Labor unions.
Techies believed they didn't need unions because their compensation is high, and "meritocracy" yadda yadda. But unions were never just about compensation. Crucially, they also collectively negotiate working conditions.
You quitting your job is not necessarily much of a threat to your employer. But a union going on strike, effectively everyone quitting simlultaneously, is a major threat.
There's been whole genocidal campaigns waged where people were just treating it as a day job.
It's even worse when you consider that even if you were to opt out of Meta services entirely (which is not practical due to how many essential things run on e.g. whatsapp), they still build a shadow profile on you based only on data other people upload about you. So yeah, not only "just don't use it" is not a reasonable argument, it doesn't even solve anything!
Meta, the company built on watching everything its billions of users do online so it can keep them clicking on ragebait and targeted ads, is reportedly now installing surveillance software on employees’ work computers.
Newswire Reuters reports that Meta management sent staff a memo informing them that they’ll soon run a new tool called “Model Capability Initiative” that will record their keystrokes, mouse movements, and even take occasional screenshots – all in the name of gathering data the social networking giant can use to build better AI models.
Business Insider claims it’s got the memo, which apparently says surveillance will observe workers as they use “work-related applications and URLs” including Gmail, GChat, VCCode, and an internal app called “Metamate”.
The document reportedly explains that Meta feels AI models don’t understand how people use computers, so the company needs real-life examples of how meatbags click their way through a working day so it can build agents. CTO Andrew Bosworth apparently said collecting this data from Meta staff will help the company to realize a vision for a world “where our agents primarily do the work and our role is to direct, review and help them improve.”
Meta is not alone in pursuing such a vision: Anthropic debuted tech capable of doing this in 2024 and OpenAI last year announced “Operator” – a tool that can use a web browser on a human’s behalf.
Microsoft has even created a special type of cloud PC for agents to use.
All imagine that in the not-too-distant future many of us will designate some tasks that we currently undertake with our own brains and fingers on a physical PC to an agent that uses a virtual PC. AI folk imagine asking an agent to book an airfare, respond to email, or constantly scan e-tail sites to spot a discount for a desired item and then swoop in to make a purchase.
Meta’s term for this sort of thing is a “personal superintelligence” that CEO-for-life Mark Zuckerberg says “helps you achieve your goals, create what you want to see in the world, experience any adventure, be a better friend to those you care about, and grow to become the person you aspire to be.”
So long as your goals and aspirations don’t include workplace privacy.
This situation is replete with irony, given Meta has for years mined its users for information and often run afoul of privacy laws.
Now the company’s remaining staff can get a taste of the unease users have felt for years. ®
Agree, but at one point you're also effectively betraying people who typically want to give you solidarity, especially when you're working on systems and tooling used for suppressing said solidarity. So yeah, fuck you Meta employees for completely lacking any sort of spine.
Clutch those pearls!
I agree with you about the solidarity though. Anyone speaking out against this shit-world we've created with the internet is welcome.
And will those help them get where they think they want to go?
This is a "being a part of an extremely large group of people, some entirely separate members of the group are doing bad stuff"
Are there no groups you are a part of where members have done bad things? are you sure?
Do you seriously blame the death star technicians? The cooks at the death star canteen? I find that extremely hard to understand. Do you dislike people from entire countries because of things their governments did too?
Where do you live that WhatsApp is essential?
I deleted my account when Facebook bought it and I don’t feel like anything of value was lost. Between messages/sms, signal, telegram, discord, I have no shortage of places to chat.
WhatsApp only has value because of the network effect. Quit the platform and make your contacts find you elsewhere. Every platform dies eventually. The users just need to leave.
I don’t really care about the shadow profile. Meta is hardly the first to build a database of non customers, and it’s not the only such database I’m in. I avoid all Meta services and will never see an ad from them.
Meta stock is up 33% last year, up 122% in the last 5 years. If that isn't "being where you want to be", I don't know what is.
Long term strategically planned reduction of average salary by replacing uppity rockstars/activists with the groveling creme de la creme of codemonkeys is part of the plan.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/08/t-mobile-claimed...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/ice-cell-m...
How does that even remotely make sense?
You can’t choose where you’re born, you can choose who you work for.
Also Meta isn’t a nation state.
When their governments are democratically elected, sometimes, ya. I don't want to give you any spoilers, but there's maybe a reason the average American is looked at least favourably as of late.
There are also cultural beefs that have existed for longer than I've been alive that are not even all that rational, but continue to persist. Whole cultures hating each other.
> Do you seriously blame the death star technicians? The cooks at the death star canteen?
I think someone from Aldereen might have a hard time grabbing a beer with a death star technician. Most people probably understand that blame is not equally shared, but that those technicians were on the wrong side of history. Exceptions might include people forcefully enslaved to work on the death star - and, from a distance, an external observer still would not know the difference at first glance between forceful participation, passive participation, and active participation.
It often takes time/generations to heal from the pain of their parents choices - whether those choices were active or passive. Sins of the father and all that (though I think it's unfair to put parental misdeeds onto their kids, it also historically happens a lot).
I understand THAT its happening, but do you think that's right? moral?
would you be happy about it if you were a random american? one who had voted against whatever is happening there? What about one who couldn't vote at all?
Not that I agree with the idea of blaming all Meta employees (e.g. janitors, drivers etc don't deserve the blame), but I do think the ones doing the computer work deserve some blame.
1a) Life's not fair sometimes and talking about the morality of life not being fair isn't going to change how people perceive you when you vote a certain way or happen to live in a country where the majority of the country voted a certain way. Once your country is shitting on other countries, y'all end up being painted by the same broad strokes. Reputational damage does not discriminate and the long term consequences of such damage won't, either. Not all that different than how when bombs are launched during war, the bombs are not checking the voting records of the civilians in their paths. If people don't like this reality and they did not vote for it, they should actively try harder to fix that reality - even if this is a hard thing to ask.
2) I'll repeat - once you're working on the death star, no matter why, people and history are not going to look at you favourably. At some later point in time, this might even become a shame you try to hide from the world.
I can agree that the teams working on the specific features have quite a lot of blame. Those asked to implement immoral ads/algorithm stuff. But how many are those people as a proportion of the entire staff?
I'm no debate lord, merely expressed my dislike of the baying for blood people clearly have here, pointed at everyone seemingly except the actual people responsible
They all chose to work at Meta. And for the vast majority of them (especially programmers) there were other choices.
If people are supposed to stop working at meta if they want to keep being a "good person" then they go work somewhere else.
Can they work at any of the largest employers? can they be sure?
The people worked and kept working at Facebook after these huge and small issues
- after Myanmar genocide
- after paying teenagers to spy on them through VPN
- after falsifying its ad metrics that ended up negatively affecting and outright destroying multiple publishers and creators
- after billions in dollars of fines paid over multiple breaches of user privacy, and misleading users about their privacy
And that's just off the top of my head.
- and (irony is dead) after Facebook unconditionally opted every single user, and their data, and their content on their platform into AI training
So don't give me the righteous indignant spiel about innocent workers who are just doing their jobs and are really really good at heart. Most of them chose to work for Meta despite all these things (and despite significantly more NDA things discussed inside the company that we don't know about). Many of those also chose to work on and contribute to ads, tracking, AI, surveillance etc. and all the infrastructure for it and have no moral qualms doing so. Spare me the sanctimoniousness.
Yes, many companies are morally gray. But, again, especially developers have their pick of companies they can go to. Including companies that are less morally gray. They chose Facebook.
I think expecting everyone else (which is, I believe, almost everyone working at facebook) not involved with any of these things to take a large personal sacrifice or be condemned is unlikely to result in many resignations. You're asking people to be hurt for the actions of others.
The best argument you have here is the moment someone starts working at facebook, after these things happen. I don't know that they should be condemned, but I can understand looking at them with some suspicion. Still, its hard to say its the worst thing in the world to do, accept employment for a shitty person. Who hasn't complained about their boss?
When you lump in people who have done nothing wrong (and in fact you have no information about what they are or are not doing to stop things like this) for failing to stop the actions of others together with those committing acts of evil, you are making a totalizing statement. There is nothing they can do to redeem themselves. They are morally equivalent to the people doing the terrible things. Which is absurd.
To claim that my analogies to countries are "non-working" is ridiculous. This is the exact same argument as "are citizens of israel complicit in the actions of their government" or "are citizens of the usa" or "are citizens of palestine" or "are citizens of iran". If anything, I feel citizens of a country have far more potential to change the course of what those countries do than an employee at a company like facebook. (they still have almost no power at all, so the point is essentially moot. But at least democracies are outwardly meant to follow the will of their citizens, and coordination is encouraged) What power workers may have, only works when they coordinate action (which I think should be encouraged. These people are your friend).
We need more rational, sober judgement in the world, not mob justice.