Overview
- Employees at several U.S. Meta offices handed out flyers protesting new mouse-tracking on work computers and urged colleagues to sign a petition.
- The pamphlets appeared in meeting rooms, on vending machines, and on restroom fixtures and asked, “Don't want to work at the Employee Data Extraction Factory?”
- Meta said it needs real examples of computer use, like cursor movement, clicks and menu navigation, to build AI agents and said safeguards protect sensitive content and limit other uses.
- The protest comes about a week before expected cuts of roughly 10% of the workforce, a plan that workers fear could pair surveillance data with AI tools that may replace some roles.
- Organizing has widened as U.S. flyers cite the National Labor Relations Act and a U.K. group starts a union drive with United Tech and Allied Workers, whose organizer Eleanor Payne criticized layoffs and monitoring.