Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work - but only for half an hour at a time

Meta has rolled back its plan to track employees' computer activity in response to criticism from its own staff. The company announced in April that it would log keystrokes and mouse clicks to train its AI models, sparking concern among workers. The new tool, called the Model Capability Initiative (MCI), was met with resistance from employees, including some who started a petition against the move, which now has over 1,500 signatures.

In response, Meta has introduced new controls that allow employees to pause data collection for "up to 30 minutes at a time" as well as request exemptions from the initiative altogether. During the initial announcement of the MCI, Meta told the BBC that the data was "not used for any other purpose," and the tool had "safeguards in place to protect sensitive content". The company argued that the data was necessary to train its AI models, saying "If we're building agents to help people complete everyday tasks using computers, our models need real examples of how people actually use them." However, workers were not convinced, with one Meta employee describing the tracking tool as "very dystopian" and another who recently left the company saying it was "just the latest way they're shoving AI down everyone's throat".

Meta has laid off around 2,000 employees this year, and the company told employees in April it planned to cut 10% of its workforce - roughly 8,000 staff. According to an internal memo seen by Reuters, Stephane Kasriel, a vice president in Meta's Superintelligence Labs unit, said the team behind the MCI had introduced "several optimizations" to reduce its impact on laptop battery life. The memo also stated that the team had heard employee concerns about personal data on work devices, battery life, and wanting more control over when capturing happens.

The changes come after reports that employees were finding the tool consumed so much data it was causing their internet usage to surge when working from home.