Meta Employees Reportedly Launch Protest Over Tech Tracking Mouse Movements And Keystrokes

Meta employees have launched a protest against the company’s decision to implement a technology tracking their mouse movement and keystrokes to train its AI model, according to a new report.

Reuters detailed that employees are distributing flyers across U.S. offices encouraging colleagues to sign an online petition against the initiative. “Don’t want to work at the Employee Data ​Extraction Factory?” the flyer says.

The petition in question claims that “when employees asked what privacy reviews were conducted, including any ‘people data reviews’ (which are required for processing employee data), no completed privacy reviews were provided.”

“The outlined privacy mitigations were vague, and leadership’s confidence in them appeared limited – evidenced by the selective opt-out afforded to executives,” it adds.

The petition goes on to say that employees are speaking up “because it’s expected of us and, more importantly, because it is the right thing to do.” “Collecting and repurposing this kind of data raises serious concerns around privacy, consent, and trust in the workplace,” employees said.

Meta said in late April that the tool, called Model Capability Initiative (MCI), will also take snapshots of employees’ screens. A Staff AI research scientist sent a memo to the rest of the company, saying the goal is improving the company’s AI models in areas where they are struggling to replicate the way in which humans interact with computers.

“This is where all Meta employees can help our models get better simply by doing their daily work,” reads a passage of the document.

In another memo, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth said that the company will increase internal data collection efforts. “The vision we are building towards is ​one where our agents primarily do the work and our role is to direct, review and help them improve,” he said.

He didn’t explain how agents will be trained but noted that the company will be “rigorous” in “building up data and evals for all the types of interactions we have as we go about our work.”

Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said the model needs “real example” of how people use computers for every day tasks to help develop AI. “Things like mouse movements, clicking buttons, and navigating dropdown menus,” he said.

The employees’ protest also comes after the company said it will cut 8,000 jobs, effectively turning those layoffs into a line item in a $145 billion artificial intelligence funding plan that he says allows ‘one or two people’ to do work that once required dozens.