Employee Surveillance

If you were writing a dystopian tech thriller, you’d struggle to invent a plot more on-the-nose than what Meta announced this week. The company is cutting 10% of its workforce — roughly 8,000 people — while simultaneously rolling out software that tracks employee mouse movements, clicks, and keystrokes to train AI models. The models that will, eventually, do their jobs. The Tracking Tool Nobody Asked For Reuters broke the story earlier this week. Meta is deploying an internal tool called the Model Capability Initiative (MCI) to U.S.-based employees. It captures mouse movements, clicks, keystrokes, and periodic screenshots. The goal: teach AI models the messy, real-world ways humans interact with computers. Dropdown menus, keyboard shortcuts, the digital muscle memory that machines still can’t replicate on their own. ...

Your employer watching your screen isn’t new. But your employer recording every mouse movement, every keystroke, every dropdown menu selection — and feeding it all into an AI that might eventually replace you? That’s a different beast entirely. Meta just crossed that line, and its own employees are furious about it. What the Model Capability Initiative Actually Does On April 21st, Meta’s Superintelligence Labs team rolled out the Model Capability Initiative (MCI) to all US-based employees and contractors. The tool captures mouse movements, click locations, keystrokes, and periodic screenshots — all piped directly into Meta’s AI training pipeline. ...