> You’d no longer be able to disent, or discuss anything non-work related with even the slightest expectation of privacy.

When I joined the workforce a long time ago, I went in with the mindset that: Their property, their equipment, their right to monitor (or even keylog).

I was pleasantly surprised to find that not to be the case, but I've always believed in their right to do so.

Why do people expect to have a right to do non-work related stuff on the job? Every company I've worked for states in the employment contract/policies what you can and cannot do on the job. They never enforce it to the extent that they outline in the policies, but it's usually clear cut.

If you want to rant about the company, do it outside the company! Or at a physical water cooler. When coworkers want to rant to me about the company, they don't use Slack/Teams. They message my personal, non-work number.

It's absolutely their right, but it's a dramatic cultural departure from the history of the company.

In the late 2010s/pre-covid it was very common for employees to port their personal cell phone number to their work phone and just not have a personal cell phone. The internal culture at the company was remarkably open for their size.

That all went away by the time I left in 2022, and from what I've heard it has only accelerated into an employee-hostile environment. I'm not shocked at this move.

While you have the right practical approach, I do believe companies should face harsh regulations preventing this kind of monitoring. It has almost universally negative effects, from enabling union-busting to exploitation to all kinds of discrimination and favoritism.

Engineers build tools for other people. The profession exists in support of human life. We make the substrate that civilization runs on.

If humans are the point, this also goes for keeping work environments humane.

1. But they are not paying for your training which you are bringing to the company. 2. About ranting about company, it is difficult to organize. That's why unions existed, and that's why unions were allowed to meet in work hours.

I cannot understand how can anyone hold such outrageously antihuman beliefs.

Governments, corporations and any other organizations should all exist FOR the people, not the other way around.

American-style capitalism truly is a disease.

There is no clean separation between personal and work. It is also more efficient to blend them (if I expect a baseline level of non-snoopiness on my work computer, I will text my boyfriend from my work laptop... obviously beneficial for the firm).

Either way when it comes to ranting about the company: many workplaces don't have a watercooler where all your team mates congregate (e.g. remote/different offices). Also what, you'll rant about confidential work projects over non-work texts?

This comments pairs really well with the song Sixteen Tons - I cued the song[1] and re-read your comment.

More substantively: I would like the employer/employee transaction to be one of buing/selling labor. To me, training AI on keystrokes nudges the deal towards selling one's "soul" next to other dystopian tropes like brain implants and work toilets that analyze excretions.

You are correct that employers own the laptops and can install anything they want, which is why I never do anything other than work there - the farthest I will go is participate in employer-hosted shitpost groups/channels, which are not anonymous, and they are free to train their models on that.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1980WfKC0o

>Why do people expect to have a right to do non-work related stuff on the job?

Like use the restroom? Personally, I'm not a slave. I am getting more and more used to the idea of having to push back on those who do exhibit such a mentality. Y'all are beginning to become a threat to the rest of us.

You would love the world of Severance! Drop your humanity and individuality at the door. Become a mindless drone

Companies pay their employees to build things. They do not pay their employees for their likeliness or the inner workings of their brains. Meta is trying to get the latter by keystroke tracking. It is an overreach in that context.

If they just want to monitor your computer for the purposes of productivity tracking, that is in their right, imo - just a shitty thing to do.

I don’t care if a company monitors which websites I go to on a work computer, what applications I run or what I say on Slack.

On the other hand I would be looking for another job if they had keyloggers or were taking screenshots even if they said anything about me shopping on Amazon or randomly browsing Hacker News or any website that wasn’t gaming or Netflix during work hours.

Heck I use to travel a lot more for business and I used my work laptop for Netflix and other streaming services in the hotel.

As long as I’m meeting performance standards it shouldn’t matter.

What a pathetic quisling attitude to life.