Shockingly, Meta employees aren’t too keen on training their robot replacements. Reuters reports that workers have begun circulating flyers at multiple US offices to protest the company’s installation of tracking software on their work computers.
“Don’t want to work at the Employee Data Extraction Factory?” the flyers ask. They’ve reportedly been found in meeting rooms, on vending machines, and even in the most sacred of spaces: atop toilet paper dispensers. The pamphlets encourage employees to sign an online petition protesting Meta’s employee surveillance program.
The flyers and petition cite the US National Labor Relations Act. “Workers are legally protected when they choose to organize for the improvement of working conditions,” the petition reads. A similar movement is underway in the UK, where workers began organizing a unionization campaign with United Tech and Allied Workers (UTAW).
It all stems from an announcement last month that Meta would install software on employees’ computers to track their mouse movements, clicks, and keystrokes. The initiative, dubbed the Agent Transformation Accelerator (ATA), is designed to train AI agents to perform complex computing tasks. “This is where all Meta employees can help our models get better simply by doing their daily work,” a company memo announcing the program read.
“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,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone told Reuters. The company tried to reassure its workers that sensitive information would be protected, claiming their data would be “tightly controlled.”
Employee reactions were less enthusiastic. “This makes me super uncomfortable,” an engineering manager wrote in an internal message board comment, The New York Times reported a few weeks after the program was announced. Others expressed worries that they were helping to train their eventual replacements. “How do we opt out?”, one employee asked. (CTO Andrew Bosworth confirmed that they can’t, in fact, opt out.)
It’s hard to imagine workers warming to the move regardless of context. But the fact that ATA is coinciding with a 10 percent reduction of the company’s workforce makes for an even more ominous backdrop. One employee reportedly commented that the program was “incredibly demoralizing.” Another told Bosworth, “Your callousness to the concerns of your own employees is concerning.” Workers have created websites counting down to the May 20 layoffs. (One describes the event as the “Big Beautiful Layoffs.”)
As for how many more workers will lose their jobs, Meta is still working on that. “We don’t really know what the optimal size of the company will be in the future,” CFO Susan Li told investors in April. “I think there’s a lot of change right now, with AI capabilities advancing rapidly.”
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