Meta's employees held protests at various US branches of the tech giant's offices after it installed tracking software on their work computers to monitor keystrokes, clicks, and mouse movements, according to reports on Thursday.
Members of the company's work force reportedly handed out protest flyers to others at meetings, close to vending machines and inside restrooms, requesting them to sign an online petition against the use of this software. Meta stated that it would be used to help train its autonomous AI models according to internal memos cited by Reuters in April.
This development comes amid the company's plans to layoff 10% of its employees across the globe as part of its restructuring plans around funding and expanding AI development. The company is set to cut 8,000 jobs and freeze 6,000 open roles.
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The company's spokesperson Andy Stone had stated the software would not be used to evaluate employee performance or for purposes beside AI training.
""If we're building agents to help people complete everyday tasks using computers, our models need real examples of how people actually use them — things like mouse movements, clicking buttons, and navigating dropdown menus. To help, we're launching an internal tool that will capture these kinds of inputs on certain applications to help us train our models," Stone told Reuters.
Meta's workforce seems to be in opposition to the company training their AI models on their work while cutting jobs from within their ranks.
"Don't want to work at the Employee Data Extraction Factory?" the flyers said.
The pamphlets and the petition cited the U.S. National Labor Relations Act, that said "workers are legally protected when they choose to organize for the improvement of working conditions."
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Meta's employees in the UK have also taken note of the situation, and organised a unionisation drive for United Tech and Allied Workers (UTAW) a section of the Communication Workers Union.
“Meta's workers are paying the price for management's reckless and expensive bets. While executives chase speculative AI strategies, staff are facing devastating job cuts, draconian surveillance, and the cruel reality of being forced to train the inefficient systems being positioned to replace them," Elanor Payne, a UTAW organised told Reuters.
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