I'll be the contrarian here.

I think the program was legal and morally fine.

Take into account that these are corporate computers, and the tracking is of work that the company is paying for, so the telemetry, which is highly valuable for analysis and automation, is rightfully theirs.

I also don't think that the purpose of the move was to manage workers and see if they slack off, it was to gather training data, but even if it were, I think that's normal? In any other job managers can, and are expected to, monitor employee productivity, they are paying for it, they need to ensure they are getting something worth. But again, I don't think that was the main goal here.

The computers are not intended for personal usage, if the employee wants to watch netflix, or porn, they are free to do so in their personal computers.

Imagine if this were a construction company, and there's a foreman watching the employees output, and the machine operators have their actions logged so that the machines can be automated in the future. Doesn't it sound reasonable? Is this very different at all?

So yeah, maybe a lot of people see Meta and computer tracking and immediately jump to 1984, but I kind of like nuance more than knee jerk reactions, or jumping into a narrative that we enjoy being angry about.

> Doesn't it sound reasonable?

If you were hired with this as an explicit expectation, yes. It's one thing to know that your actions can be audited in case there's some sort of incident but imposing unlimited surveillance and using that information for the purpose of eliminating your job could be argued to be intimidation (ie. "we can't afford mass layoffs but aggressively monitoring employees will force the undesirables to quit").

No one likes the terms of their employment being changed against their will no matter how legal it might be. Why not make it opt-in in exchange for some other perks? If the data is valuable then compensate employees for the added burden/liability of total telemetry.

As it turns out, they did watch porn: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/10/meta-says-porn-d...

> I also don't think that the purpose of the move was to manage workers and see if they slack off, it was to gather training data, but even if it were, I think that's normal?

This is the cost of losing consumer trust over two decades of untrustworthy acts.

Nope. Nope nope nope NOPE. No part of this is remotely reasonable. Stop normalising mass surveillance. It is not okay. Not even your own employees, to this degree. Employees are humans too (maybe not the ones at Meta, but I'm speaking in general). Just because somebody is receiving a paycheck for something does not make them fair game for anything and everything to be done to them.

> there's a foreman watching the employees output, and the machine operators have their actions logged so that the machines can be automated in the future. Doesn't it sound reasonable? Is this very different at all?

Yes. Every time these analogies to normalise mass surveillance are brought up, they mistake "another human or two can see you doing something in real time" with "a permanent record of every single action you ever take in your entire life, micromanaged down to the millisecond, accessible to many people over a period of years". That is, in fact, very different at all.