Irony as Meta staff unhappy about running surveillance software on work PCs

185 points - today at 8:33 AM

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softwaredoug today at 11:20 AM
This article is just a summary of other articles. Specifically these two more detailed ones:

https://www.itnews.com.au/news/meta-to-start-capturing-emplo...

https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-new-ai-tool-tracks-staf...

yfw today at 11:10 AM
Read Careless People. The fish rots from the head
rubyfan today at 12:21 PM
The Zuckerberg quote from the article reads like someone running for class president in high school.

> 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.

nsbk today at 10:58 AM
Surveillance for thee, not for me
poulpy123 today at 10:58 AM
I don't see what can be trained with that, but it would be a nightmare to be always recorded like that
Devasta today at 12:00 PM
Meta employees shocked to find out they work for Meta.
mykowebhn today at 11:15 AM
s/Irony/Schadenfreude/g
fhennig today at 11:13 AM
In the actual article (not the headline) there is no mention of staff reporting to be unhappy.
bossyTeacher today at 12:04 PM
Not unhappy enough to leave though.
deleted today at 11:24 AM
jjgreen today at 8:33 AM
Full title prefixed "Magnificent"
villgax today at 11:55 AM
gonna cry
joe_mamba today at 11:00 AM
Man, I sure wonder if those engineers building Palantir's, Flock's, and other surveillance SW right now (hello if you're reading this), will have this 20/20 hindsight "oh shit" epiphany moment, when the product they helped build is gonna be used against them or their kids in the future. Kind of like when Dr. Frankenstein finds his end at the hands of his creation.

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?

notTheLastMan today at 11:34 AM
Fam, what should we actually do about this?

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.

RugnirViking today at 10:50 AM
I really don't like the conflation of all meta staff with the strategy of the massive multinational corpo-monster that is meta itself. Its very easy to suggest that someone should leave their job on ideological grounds when its someone else you've never met. I don't work at meta, I work at a large non-tech company.

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.