Meta остановила слежку за сотрудниками ради ИИ после петиции 1600 работников

Meta halted a program that was tracking employee activity on work computers in the background — keystrokes, mouse movements, and screen content. The data collection was intended to train Meta's own AI models. The pause came after approximately 1,600 workers signed an internal petition demanding the program be stopped.

What exactly the tracker was recording

The tool deployed by Meta on corporate machines continuously recorded all employee-computer interactions: every keystroke, every mouse click, and everything displayed on screen at any moment of the workday. In effect, the program created a detailed real-time record of each worker's professional activity.

The collected data was intended to be used for training Meta's language and multimodal AI models. The logic is clear: live work sessions of experienced professionals contain behavioral patterns and contextual signals that cannot be obtained from public sources.

Similar experiments were conducted by the startup Adept, which attempted to train agent systems on real user computer sessions. The difference is that Adept worked with volunteers — at Meta, the subjects were full-time employees.

An important nuance: judging by the scale of protest, the program was launched without separate explicit notification to each employee. This is a key legal and ethical issue: the difference between "consent at hiring" and "informed consent for a specific type of surveillance" is quite significant in most jurisdictions.

Why 1,600 people signed the petition

The internal petition, which gathered around 1,600 signatures, is one of the largest known cases of open disagreement in Meta's history. The company is not known for a tradition of public internal discussions, so this number indicates that discontent spread across a significant portion of the team, rather than remaining isolated complaints.

Key employee grievances:

• Data collection without separate explicit consent from each program participant
• Screen content recording — including personal chats, document drafts, and confidential work materials
• Lack of clarity: what specific data is stored, for how long, and who has access to it
• Concerns that recordings could be used to evaluate productivity, not just for AI training
• Violation of basic sense of privacy even when working on corporate equipment

Meta employee monitors display materials daily related to future products, negotiations with partners, legal documents, and internal correspondence. Transferring such data to a training pipeline — even within the company — raises obvious questions about the boundaries of corporate privacy.

Meta's response: a pause without details

Meta did not clarify whether the halt is a temporary measure — for instance, during an internal audit period — or whether the program is closed permanently. The company also did not disclose whether work data collection continues through other methods or within other programs.

"We hear the team's concerns and take privacy issues seriously," sources cite

Meta leadership's position.

The pause itself is noteworthy. Technology giants rarely back down under pressure from internal petitions — especially when it comes to AI initiatives, where competition demands speed. The fact that Meta still took a step back suggests the scale of discontent exceeded the threshold the company was willing to ignore for development goals.

What this means

Meta's case is one of the first publicly known episodes in which a large corporation collected employee data to train its own AI models and faced massive internal protest. This exposes a key contradiction of the corporate AI boom: the more aggressively a company exploits internal data, the greater the risk of destroying the trust of the people on whom its product depends.

Regulatory pressure on data collection is already intensifying — particularly in the EU. Now internal resistance is being added to it. This is a signal that other technology corporations considering similar programs are unlikely to ignore.

*Meta has been recognized as an extremist organization and is banned in the Russian Federation.