Meta is using mouse-tracking software on employees. Now they're pushing back.

"Meta employees have been asked to enthusiastically adopt AI and are now evaluated on their AI use in performance reviews. Recurring layoffs have reportedly stoked discontent: According to a recent New York Times report, employees have built websites to count down to another round of rumored job cuts next week."

"Now the company is also using mouse-tracking software to collect employee data that will help train Meta's AI models-and employees are not having it. A Reuters report today revealed that an online petition is circulating at the company, and that employees have even posted physical flyers to encourage their colleagues to sign."

"The flyers were distributed across multiple U.S. offices in meeting rooms and on vending machines, and according to Reuters, included the following language: "Don't want to work at the Employee Data Extraction Factory?" Employees cannot opt out of being tracked by the mouse-tracking software if they are using a company laptop, which has fueled privacy concerns among its workforce and questions about whether they are training AI that will ultimately replace them."

""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," a Meta spokesperson previously told Fast Company. "To help, we're launching an internal tool that will capture these kinds of inputs on certain applications to help us train our models." (As for the concerns over privacy, Meta also noted that there were "safeguards in place to protect sensitive content.")"

Meta has invested heavily in AI development and has pushed employees to adopt AI tools, including tying AI use to performance reviews. Layoffs and rumored job cuts have increased employee discontent. Meta is also collecting employee interaction data using mouse-tracking software on company laptops, which employees say they cannot opt out of. Employees have responded by circulating an online petition and posting physical flyers across U.S. offices, including messaging that frames the tracking as an “Employee Data Extraction Factory.” Meta says the data is needed to train AI agents that perform computer-based tasks using real examples of mouse movements, clicking, and navigation, and it claims safeguards protect sensitive content.

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