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.
fhennig 1 hours ago [-]
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.
NikolaosC 40 minutes ago [-]
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
newshackr 2 hours ago [-]
There isn't exactly a surplus of jobs today. While some may have this option, many do not.
spacechild1 2 hours ago [-]
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.
physhster 2 hours ago [-]
^ 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
spacechild1 57 minutes ago [-]
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.
Peritract 2 hours ago [-]
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.
the_snooze 21 minutes ago [-]
Exactly, these are highly-paid professionals with very broadly applicable skills. They have the means to uphold professional values.
hirako2000 2 hours ago [-]
That's a good point. The crux is privacy or half your salary.
glimshe 1 hours ago [-]
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.
none2585 2 hours ago [-]
Eh - if you have Meta on your resume it's not that tough out there right now.
dccoolgai 2 hours ago [-]
TBH if I see "late Meta" or "post-Musk Twitter/X" on a resume it gets filed as "low morals / low trust".
ForHackernews 2 hours ago [-]
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)
2 hours ago [-]
2 hours ago [-]
Frieren 27 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
michaelt 12 minutes ago [-]
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?
tardedmeme 4 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
kakacik 2 minutes ago [-]
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.
ramon156 15 minutes ago [-]
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"
yodsanklai 2 hours ago [-]
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.
DoctorDabadedoo 1 hours ago [-]
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.
yodsanklai 11 minutes ago [-]
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.
junon 18 minutes ago [-]
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.
plufz 1 hours ago [-]
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.
w4yai 1 hours ago [-]
> happen all the same
No. They happen, but with a significant difference
ludicrousdispla 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Mordisquitos 1 hours ago [-]
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.
codeulike 2 hours ago [-]
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?
heresie-dabord 1 hours ago [-]
> Meta employees are up in arms over a mandatory program to train AI on their...
tolerance for abuse.
nnx 2 hours ago [-]
Coincidentally this is how pretraining works :)
Havoc 1 hours ago [-]
Cunning plan to collect more LLM training data ;)
super256 2 hours ago [-]
80 characters limit in the title.
ceejayoz 2 hours ago [-]
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".
xnorswap 2 hours ago [-]
You can squeeze it into half that length with, "Meta staff fury at Big Brother AI scheme"
brightbeige 44 minutes ago [-]
"Meta staff angry at AI"
chrisjj 1 hours ago [-]
Bathroom usage.
dist-epoch 2 hours ago [-]
TikTok videos
TacticalCoder 2 hours ago [-]
I thought it was "arms"? Although I take it that then the sentence should have ended with "theirs" and not "their"?
yubblegum 2 hours ago [-]
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.
notabotiswear 2 hours ago [-]
>"This makes me super uncomfortable. How do we opt out?"
Karma’s a b*tch, innit?
thedevilslawyer 2 hours ago [-]
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.
dist-epoch 2 hours ago [-]
Typical Meta employee:
> I can't hear you over the sound of the millions I'm making at Meta.
aldielshala 16 minutes ago [-]
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.
sys_64738 36 minutes ago [-]
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?
moregrist 37 minutes ago [-]
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.
spprashant 49 minutes ago [-]
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?
pluc 2 hours ago [-]
So they do treat their employees like their users
anygivnthursday 2 hours ago [-]
This is just v1, next release might add eye movement, pulse and brain wave tracking to train ZuckNet.
throw0101a 2 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
Schadenfreude is exactly what's needed here. The rallying words can be for another set of people/org.
zelphirkalt 2 hours ago [-]
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.
keybored 2 minutes ago [-]
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.
keybored 2 hours ago [-]
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.
nicman23 2 hours ago [-]
lol what. you are getting paying it is not slavery
zelphirkalt 2 hours ago [-]
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.
andrewstuart 3 hours ago [-]
The company is run by lizards in hoodies.
loloquwowndueo 2 hours ago [-]
Now now don’t be mean to lizards
vortegne 2 hours ago [-]
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.
zelphirkalt 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
gamerslexus 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
rootlocus 2 hours ago [-]
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.
ceejayoz 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
gamerslexus 1 hours ago [-]
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.
ceejayoz 1 hours ago [-]
Historically, that’s what tends to happen. When it does, harm reduction is wise.
compass_copium 2 hours ago [-]
The proletariat, of course.
Rendered at 12:35:56 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Of course this is not ok, but you should really quit your job if you have ethical or moral problems with that.
Everyone working at Meta has more options than almost anyone else.
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.
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?
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.
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"
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.
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.
No. They happen, but with a significant difference
> It also says it only applies to computers, not to employees' phones.
What a great motivator for employees to stop using their work computers.
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.
Meta employees are up in arms over a mandatory program to train AI on their _______
Pets?
Hairstyles?
tolerance for abuse.
I'd have gone with "Meta employees up in arms over mandatory program to train AI on their keystrokes".
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.
Karma’s a b*tch, innit?
> "This makes me super uncomfortable. How do we opt out?"
>> Opt-out is as simple as sending in your resignation to your manager.
> I can't hear you over the sound of the millions I'm making at Meta.
But I hope they successfully push back against it. I don’t want this kind of behavior normalized.
> '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
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 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
> 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
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.
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.
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.
"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.