Analysis
Liz Carolan is a fellow at Tech Policy Press.
Last month, Meta told staff that the company would be introducing an employee surveillance system it calls the “Model Capability Initiative (MCI).” All US employees would have tracking software installed on their work computers to log every mouse movement, click and keystroke, and take periodic screenshots, according to reporting by Reuters.
Staff based in Europe will not face this kind of surveillance, which is not permitted under EU privacy laws. But that does not mean the workers outside of the US, or indeed outside of Meta, will not be affected.
The purpose of this data harvesting is to build AI agents capable of replacing not just Meta’s own staff, but also as a product Meta hopes to sell to other employers. Internal memos to staff are explicit that the data being gathered is to fill a critical gap in training data for agentic models. Having abandoned a costly attempt to pivot to VR, Meta is now betting that it will become a dominant force in AI enterprise solutions, which it once called “AI for Work” but has since rebranded as its “Agent Transformation Accelerator”. Agentic AI is software that can perform tasks autonomously, but as Meta’s memo to staff states, “they {agents} struggle to replicate how humans interact with computers.”
As part of this push, Meta last year paid over $14 billion for a 49% stake in AI agent firm Scale AI, installing its Co-founder Alexandr Wang as head of its “superintelligence” team....
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