Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min

Reminds me of one of the more brilliant passages in Snow Crash, describing work in "Fed Land"...

'''

Y.T's mom pulls up the new memo, checks the time, and starts reading it. The estimated reading time is 15.62 minutes. Later, when Marietta does her end-of-day statistical roundup, sitting in her private office at 9:00 P.M., she will see the name of each employee and next to it, the amount of time spent reading this memo, and her reaction, based on the time spent, will go something like this:

Less than 10 min. Time for an employee conference and possible attitude counseling.

10-14 min. Keep an eye on this employee; may be developing slipshod attitude.

14-15.61 min. Employee is an efficient worker, may sometimes miss important details.

Exactly 15.62 min. Smartass. Needs attitude counseling.

15.63-16 min. Asswipe. Not to be trusted.

16-18 min. Employee is a methodical worker, may sometimes get hung up on minor details.

More than 18 min. Check the security videotape, see just what this employee was up to (e.g., possible unauthorized restroom break).

Y.T.'s mom decides to spend between fourteen and fifteen minutes reading the memo. It's better for younger workers to spend too long, to show that they're careful, not cocky. It's better for older workers to go a little fast, to show good management potential. She's pushing forty. She scans through the memo, hitting the Page Down button at reasonably regular intervals, occasionally paging back up to pretend to reread some earlier section. The computer is going to notice all this. It approves of rereading. It's a small thing, but over a decade or so this stuff really shows up on your work-habits summary.

'''

It's always been hard to know the extent of how draconian tracking actually is (IT pros tend to not talk about it much).

In the US, there's the expectation that when you use an employer-provided device that any and all activity on it can be fully monitored/recorded and used against the employee for any reason. In practice, however, few people worry about reasonable amounts web-surfing, being on hacker-news or doing life-activities on their work machines. Oh, here I am on hacker-news when I should be working.

With AI, this changes significantly since the man can now employ a robot to categorize and finely scrutinize every little thing with the pretext of "training" (to take your job). We will soon have to brace ourselves for an absolute draconian level of tracking.

I don't work for Meta, but how many more years do I need to work in tech? I'm in my 40s and my kids are young. I've already set up 529s for them, and am paying for some expensive home upgrades. Maybe when that is finished and I've built up a buffer I can switch industries for the last 5-10 years of my working life. Curious if anyone here has any similar plans.

I have a serious question to anyone working at Meta and reading this: HOW can you still work at this company!?

Why don't you quit this very toxic company, and start working at another place or even on your own? I genuinely don't understand...

Let just Meta die!

Could anything be more ironic, the employees that work to track every person in the world are now being tracked themselves :)

2015 satirical article from The Onion: "HR Director Reminds Employees That Any Crying Done At Office Must Be Work-Related."

But the opt outs will, of course, be tracked. Choose to do it and it will go on your performance review.

So employees unhappy about being tracked are expected to explicitly draw attention to the times their doing something where they’re uncomfortable about being monitored?

This has got to be something a blue haired HR person came up with

The people who created this policy are almost certainly exempt from it.

O'Brien turning off the Telescreen.

"You can..."

"Yes...we are allowed that privilege"

This reminds me, back in the day I had a short term contract in Austin, TX with MCI (a now defunct telco). The site was a call center and the project was working on their friends and family product.

I remember feeling outraged for the poor schmucks working at the adjacent call center. They had metered "bt time" - that is bath room time -- and were constantly monitored. This is early 90s (the golden age of being a programmer in US, imo) and our field was fun, lucrative, and really quite unlike any other whitish collar profession. Who would have thunk it that one day we would end up being treated like 'lowly and disposable' call center human resources.

By sitting in the alcove, and keeping well back, Winston was able to remain outside the range of the telescreen, so far as sight went. He could be heard, of course, but so long as he stayed in his present position he could not be seen. It was partly the unusual geography of the room that had suggested to him the thing that he was now about to do.

I have a friend that worked in NYC in part of the DOE (not a teacher, but something adjacent). Its a union position, so during COVID when everyone was getting remote, her profession got remote too.

53 minutes per week.

53 minutes. Not even a full hour. It was specific enough that you knew some bureaucrat went out of their way to hyper optimize this, creating a maximum slap-in-your-face effect.

This 30 minutes thing feels the same way.

Broken record here to announce that there are countries that have labor laws that protect employees, which you can take an example from or move to.

If I ran a mass surveillance and manipulation company that's not known for great ethics, and I managed to hire tons of people despite that reputation, then probably at least a few of those hires will be unethical/disloyal enough to someday do something against me.

So, whenever one of my employees opts out of surveillance for 30 minutes... is exactly when they secretly get maximum surveillance attention. Because what is that weasel up to.

Humorously, when an employee thinks they are off-the-record is actually when my special security unit is operating off-the-record. With questionable methods. (On-the-record, they spend all their time making employee badges and infosec reminder posters for the kitchenettes.)

Very generous and 30 minutes more than Meta allows non-employees to opt out of Meta's tracking. A clear company benefit!

The world smallest violin will be rendered in React... Why do these employees get this generous toggle, when we got zero minutes and a shadow profile?

Simple solution: unionize! The rest of the world has figured this out. Union tarrifs don't need to dictate salary bands, often they don't. More often they regulate time off, sick pay, that there are processes in place, and that you have escalation paths to negotiate on your behalf on things like this.

The best part? Strikes work!

> Now, according to Reuters, external, new controls will allow employees to pause the data collection for "up to 30 minutes at a time" as well as request exemptions from the initiative altogether.

30 minutes of opt out should be enough for anyone. Let's all praise Meta and Mark Zuckerberg for their thoughtfulness, kindness, and empathy!

If your company provides a phone or computer, you should never use it for anything other than work. Not because of any moral obligation, but because it's a big security risk for you.

Sometimes using a company device is even a risk for the company... They shoot themselves in the foot by allowing IT to silently remote takeover/view a device, or install key loggers.

If this is how they treat their employees, I hate to think how they treat their customers.

These meta articles make me think of how any tech company - even small startups - can so easily paint a picture of an individual or team performance with a frontier LLM. I use codex myself to remind me what I did over the last 6 months (look over JIRA, GitHub and my own notes) since I have to write a self evaluation. It always comes down to company culture to determine how this info will be used. Meta never struck me as a place I’d like to spend a lot of my life for culture reasons.

No one mentioned Orwell so far?

Well, in 1984 the protagonist learns after a while, that inner party members had the amazing perk of being able to turn off the mandatory surveillance screen for up to 30 minutes. But I guess in this case the workers still will be tracked by the usual Meta tracking that applies to everyone surfing the internet.

And who knows who gets to see the tick against your name as "opted out".

I get that the money is good but holy hell I don't understand why anyone still works at Meta.

30 whole minutes?! How generous.

At what point does this company undo their name change that was aligned with them pivoting to the metaverse and virtual reality?

Is Metas tracking more obscene than the traditional tracking suites at large corps like Crowdstrike? In 2017 I recall on launching a tor browser and in 15 mins physical security came to me that something fishy was going on.

This does make me chuckle. The workers for facebook inc. who make write the very software that spies on everybody is up in arms about being spied on. They forget what a grifter that the Zuck is.

If you are being tracked all day long, just create a lot of discovery for lawyers in the future: "Mark asked me to x", "Mark asked me to do y".

Right.

Meta’s biggest culture problem is definitely “not enough masculine energy”.

Meta isn't alone in the strategy, but are probably the most effective in implementation. JPMC has extensive monitoring and I don't think they have any restriction.

30 minutes of freedom! Hell yeah, sounds like a great place to work.

The movie Antitrust but on steroids in real life. Also the Crossover white collar sweatshop ended up as trendsetter.

Dave Eggers' novel _The Circle_ (2013) is looking more and more prophetic every day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circle_(Eggers_novel)

If you don't walk out after such rules, then what would you make to do so?

Is this even legal in the EU?

In 1984, high ranking members of the party could turn off their telescreens for 30 minutes without suspicion.

Sick company environment.

That's generous!

In many cases they pay really well I heard, so I'm not too bothered by it. If you are a high paid specialist and you do not like how you are treated, you can go and find another, friendlier, job.

For low paid workers I have more sympathy: if you have no options but to be tracked and pee in bottles and ... whatnot; that's just sad. We need better labour law to protect them.

Also all corporates that did anti-unionizing and never got punished for this are simply criminals operating above the law at this point. We know many FAANG++ did it.

This is great, I hope the people at Meta suffer as much as possible while working for them. They should introduce mandatory eyeball sanders next.

Meta where anything goes absolutely for making money...

Working as a dev at Meta has become like working a call center. Zuck lost the plot.

AI? What happened to the Metaverse? I thought that was the future, mr Zuckerberg? What happened?

I mean I would want to do this when I do confidential stuff like HR and Payroll. I would be interested above what level are employees are exempt from this. I don't think Meta wants to train their AI on their own C-Level execs but who knows...it's Meta

How considerate

I hate it when companies use this kind of trick to get around legislation or privacy concerns.

"Employees are able to turn off tracking".

Sure, but there is a power imbalance, and employees will come to understand ( although never stated in any handbook ) that the rate at which they disable it will be taken into account in performance reviews.

Just like "unlimited PTO" is not a benefit, because employees self-regulate their use down to less than they'd get if they negotiated a fixed amount.

It's a twisted legal trick to get out of an obligation.

That's very generous.

They need to unionize.

Do toilet breaks count towards the 30 minutes?

I don't know why anyone would accept a job there at this point. I mean, I never would have worked there because I didn't care about the mission (never been on any of the major platforms). But around a decade ago, when they were actively poisoning the mood around tech (and I was very angry that they were gonna cause the public to turn on us), I really would have thought so. But people want paychecks that allow a certain standard of living, so… I could understand.

If you take a job there today, what the hell is wrong with you?

When the market turns (and it will regardless of how loudly AI cheerleaders proclaim otherwise), I just hope engineers as a whole remember this despicable behaviour by Zuckerberg.

The silver lining(If you can call it that) of the latest slump in tech employment is that it has laid bare the reality of the tech oligarchs. Someone should set up a website to catalog this behaviour so that these corporations and leaders can't easily sweep this under the rug in the future.

Similar to the LLM hype, the point of this program is to demonstrate labor's fealty to capital.

The message is: Fuck you if you're a software developer. Your skills are irrelevant. You should be grateful that we haven't made conditions even worse.

Back to work slaves!

Just don't blame me if your coding agent curses CEO and bypasses presubmits with dirty hacks a year later, I never volunteered to be a role model.

do the meta employees that code these stuff also get tracked?

Just enough time to...

Meanwhile… Alan Dye breathes a sigh of relief and resumes another 30 minute session of Minesweeper.

After beta-testing widespread privacy invasive software on billions of their users, the employees now complain about the same technology being used against them.

That's just too bad and Meta does not care. If these employees don't like it, just leave Meta. (They won't).

I suggest they opt out of the whole 24 hours

I used to work for a oil company, and 15 years ago they were discussing this idea of installing sensors on desk which they wanted to use for practical reasons: Instead of having to walk across the building to see someone, you could simply check on some internal website if they were at their desk. No wasted trip!

But that idea was shot down real fast by the unions, who informed the employer that it with great likelihood also would clash with data protection laws, and GDPR (this was not in the US). So it was quickly abandoned. Among workers that was one of the most dystopian ideas we had heard of.

Meta has written itself into a solid tyrant role. A million aspiring rebels are happy to play along.

I'm looking forward to the HN story sometime next year about employees being let go for opting out of tracking.

Can't you just use your own personal device and avoid the tracking entirely?

Somehow this is way more dystopian than not having an opt out at all.

If you are wondering why they are doing things like this at FAANG, its because of this: YouTube /watch?v=YTuM-GS8Qak

The corporate overlords are becoming too benevolent these days! Why not monitor employees' thoughts in real time?

Who in their right minds would trust this...?

Quite objectively, the track record for management demonstrating bad faith and lying about this is deep and long.

So much wild and insulting about this, but one thing is just the idea that it’s somehow more efficient to capture raw HCI data to train models to interact with computers better than humans can, rather than just doing the work to improve the software and interaction models in the first place. So much of the coming compute overbuild is going to be wasted on the stupidest ideas.

> new controls will allow employees to pause the data collection for "up to 30 minutes at a time" as well as request exemptions from the initiative altogether.

If they deny your exemption, make a tool that every 30 minutes fakes a bunch of nonsensical keystrokes for a few seconds, then automatically request another 30 minute pause. If they ever find out and confront you about it, say you’ve always heard Meta leadership encourages “moving fast and breaking things” and “asking for forgiveness instead of permission”, so you were only following the company’s ethos.

Or, you know, quit Facebook if you have the means.

oooh 30 whole minutes. This is so repulsive.

Surely they can't be serious?

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]