Khaberni - In a move approaching the boundaries of spying, the American company "Meta" decided to use tracking software installed on its employees' computers inside the United States to record their usage, including clicks and keystrokes, in addition to taking random screenshots of their work activities, according to a report by Bloomberg.
The company internally justified this approach by stating its intention to use this data to train its internal artificial intelligence models on some tasks that they had previously found challenging to perform, including selecting from dropdown menus or clicking and tracking links.
The new tool that "Meta" intends to use is named "Model Capabilities Initiative" (MCI) for short, and its use will be constrained to job-related applications and tools, meaning it will not have access to employees' personal data or their personal applications.
Its use will be limited to employees in the United States only at this time, with no clarification on whether this will extend to the rest of the company's employees around the world.
Moreover, Meta's CTO Andrew Bosworth explained that the company's efforts to collect data and train internal artificial intelligence models would increase in pursuit of the company's ultimate vision of having AI models capable of performing various job tasks.
The company's spokesperson, Andy Stone, confirmed that the MCI data gathered from employees' computers are among the data referred to by Bosworth.
Training for Replacement
The use of this tool by "Meta" comes in the context of a new wave of layoffs that the company is preparing to begin soon, according to a separate report from Reuters, with the company planning to lay off about 20% of its total workforce in the coming months.
A separate report from Forbes magazine states that the layoffs are to start at the end of May, with the company planning to lay off 8,000 employees in what would be the third largest layoff wave since 2022 when it laid off more than 10,000 employees at once.
Furthermore, the company plans to expand its overall investments to reach 135 billion dollars compared to 115 billion dollars last year, with the majority of this investment directed towards the artificial intelligence sector, as per the Bloomberg report.
In a previous interview, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of "Meta," declared his intention to replace many jobs with AI-powered robots, noting that technology has advanced enough to perform the roles of mid-level programmers.
The company's reliance on artificial intelligence is not only for replacing its employees but also extends to attempts to completely replicate Zuckerberg using artificial intelligence so that employees can access him at any time, as well as leaving some tasks to an AI version of Zuckerberg.
Legal Concerns
According to Ifeoma Ajunwa, a law professor at Yale University, employee and computer monitoring technologies have typically been used to search for errors off-duty activities that violate company policies, based on her conversation with "Reuters".
Ajunwa described "Meta's" approach to using direct monitoring tools as a form of surveillance that was previously exclusive to delivery and gig economy workers.
While US law does not restrict the monitoring tools that companies may use to monitor their employees, the situation is quite different under European laws according to remarks from Valerio De Stefano, a law professor at York University in Toronto.
De Stefano added that such a move would cause legal troubles for "Meta" in European countries such as Italy, which completely bans all forms of electronic monitoring of employees, and in Germany, where there must be a suspicion of criminal activity before employees' computers can be monitored.
