Meta Engineer’s Viral Post Protests Laptop Surveillance

Meta’s latest internal policy is sparking serious backlash from its own workforce. A senior engineer at the company posted a message that has now been seen by nearly 20,000 colleagues, voicing strong opposition to the mandatory laptop surveillance software that Meta began rolling out to U.S. employees last month. “Selfishly, I don’t want my screen scraped because it feels like an invasion of my privacy,” the engineer wrote. “But zooming out, I don’t want to live in a world where humans,employees or otherwise,are exploited for their training data.”

The post was part of a broader effort to rally support behind an internal petition that has been circulating since last Thursday. It demands an end to what Meta refers to as the Model Capability Initiative, a piece of software that records employee screens when using specific applications. According to Reuters, the tool is designed to capture “real examples of how people actually use” computers, including mouse movements, clicking buttons, and navigating dropdown menus. The goal is to collect data for training AI systems. Meta has not disclosed whether the data collected so far has proven useful.

“I’m mixed on AI. On one hand, I really enjoy using it to write software. On the other hand, I’m really nervous about its impact on the world,” the engineer wrote in an internal forum for coders. “And what kind of norms are we establishing about how the technology is used, and how people are going to be treated?”

The petition, also reviewed by WIRED, states plainly that “it should not be the norm that companies of any size are permitted to exploit their employees by nonconsensually extracting their data for the purposes of AI training.”

In the United States, employers generally have broad legal authority to monitor workers’ devices for security, training, evaluation, and safety. But using that data to build AI training datasets that teach systems to navigate computers without human supervision appears to be a new frontier,and one that many Meta employees find unacceptable. Over the past few years, several companies have entered the race to develop agentic AI models, but they have typically relied on volunteers, sometimes paid, who consent to having their computer activity recorded.

Meta’s decision to push forward with its tracking tool despite weeks of employee protest has become a major factor in what 16 current and former employees recently described to WIRED as record-low morale. It is also the primary driver of a unionization effort at Meta’s UK offices.

“The workplace surveillance and training AI models is the number one thing,” says Eleanor Payne, a representative of United Tech and Allied Workers, which is helping organize Meta employees. She declined to specify how many employees are seeking to form a labor union but called the effort “significant” and unprecedented.

Although only U. S. employees are currently being monitored, UK workers are concerned for their colleagues and worried the program could expand. “I think of it pretty much as a breakdown of trust,” Payne says. She adds that new laws making it easier to unionize in the UK have boosted employees’ confidence in their chances of success.

In Meta’s California and New York offices, workers have been posting flyers in cafeterias and other shared spaces, directing colleagues to the petition. Two employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media, say the company has removed some posters. Those placed in bathroom stalls appear to remain up longer.