Tech
Meta will track employee mouse movements and keystrokes for AI training, report says
Meta is about to ramp up surveillance of its employees, Reuters reports, but in a very 2026 twist, it's not meant to catch people slacking off.
Reuters reports that Meta is installing tracking software that can capture mouse movements and keystrokes on U.S.-based employees' computers. While this sort of surveillance isn't unheard of in corporate America, the motivation here is slightly novel: Meta is reportedly going to use the data to train AI agents, per a company memo seen by Reuters.
This will be done through a tool called Model Capability Initiative, or MCI.
Meta's memo said the idea is to help AI agents improve at tasks they currently struggle with, such as using keyboard shortcuts. And in a different memo reportedly sent to employees on Monday, CTO Andrew Bosworth said to expect more internal data collection in order to make agents better at replicating human work. The goal, per Bosworth, is for agents to do most of the work while humans sit back and monitor the situation.
“The vision we are building towards is one where our agents primarily do the work and our role is to direct, review and help them improve," Bosworth said, per Reuters.
While Meta did not explicitly say any of this was meant to replace human workers down the line, it's reasonable to wonder if that's where this is eventually going. Tens of thousands of people lost their jobs because of AI last year, and Meta has already laid off a quadruple-digit number of people (though those were unrelated to AI) earlier this year, with more cuts coming later in May.
If, at some point in the future, Meta reduces its workforce with the aim of having AI agents do the work instead, it may have been those same Meta employees who trained the AI in the first place.
In the meantime, Reuters reports that Meta assured employees that the data will not be used in performance reviews.
Meta hasn't had a great year, privacy-wise, and we're only four months into 2026.
In March, the company was accused of sending Meta Ray-Ban user recordings, including intimate images, to offshore Meta workers, also for AI training. Earlier this month, we reported on the case of a former Meta employee under criminal investigation for downloading private Facebook photos. And after a report that Meta was planning to add facial recognition technology into its smart glasses, a group of 70 organizations, including the ACLU, signed a public letter urging Meta to reverse course.
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London's cybercrime unit is investigating a former Meta employee who allegedly downloaded more than 30,000 private user images from personal Facebook pages.
Police say the employee, a company engineer, allegedly designed a script that allowed his activity to go undetected by internal security systems, according to court documents reviewed by The Guardian.
The incident was discovered by the company over a year ago, Meta explained in a statement to the BBC. In addition to terminating the employee, Meta notified affected Facebook users and updated its security protocols. Meta then referred the case to the UK police, and authorities arrested the man in November.
"After discovering improper access by an employee over a year ago, we immediately terminated the individual, notified users, referred the matter to law enforcement and enhanced our security measures," the company said to the press. "We are co-operating with the ongoing investigation."
Meta has previously been accused of failing to appropriately notify users of privacy policies and how their data is accessed by the company, including recent concerns about Meta AI chatbot prompts being made visible to the public.
Last month, an investigation found that offshore Meta workers in Kenya were being forced to review personal recordings taken by Meta Ray-Ban glasses wearers — videos that were being shared unbeknownst to users to train the company's AI. In January, a group of international plaintiffs and whistleblowers filed a lawsuit against Meta, alleging that private WhatsApp conversations, which are end-to-end encrypted, were being accessed and analyzed by Meta employees. The company has denied the allegation.
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Former Meta employee accused of downloading 30,000 private user images
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