Meta is making some concessions in their plan to track employees' mouse clicks and keystrokes in the name of AI training, as reported by Engadget. Internally this project is known as the Model Capability Initiative (MCI).
Meta plans to allow employees to "pause" the tracking for up to 30 minutes in the event they need to "check something personal", as told in a memo for the company's workers. Some employees will also be able to request to opt out of the program altogether, but as expected, they are a special case. Like remote workers with bandwidth concerns, people who deal with "sensitive" material and those who often work in spaces where they can't easily keep laptops connected to a power source.
Meta has faced protests from employees over MCI, which was announced last month just before the company laid off 8,000 workers and reshuffled thousands of others into AI-focused roles.
Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg says that MCI is a good way to train AI models.
"The average intelligence of the people who are at this company is significantly higher than the average set of people that you can get to do tasks. --- we are using this to feed a very large amount of content into the AI model, so that way it can learn how smart people use computers to accomplish tasks."