Meta Moderates Employee Monitoring for AI Training

Social media giant Meta Platforms has been forced to partially retreat from a controversial initiative to track employees’ highly personal digital activities—including mouse movements, click patterns, and keyboard keystrokes—for the purpose of training artificial intelligence (AI) models.

Facing weeks of strong employee backlash, protests, and internal objections, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram announced the policy adjustment in an official memo on Tuesday.

According to the memo sent by Stephen Kasriel, Vice President of Meta’s Superintelligence Labs—the company’s AI model-building unit—new controls have been added to address employee concerns.

Under the revised policy, Meta employees will be allowed to temporarily pause the tracking and data collection process for up to 30 minutes at a time. In addition, employees will be able to apply for permanent exemption from the mandatory tracking program by providing reasonable justification.

Employees had complained that the tracking software significantly reduced laptop battery life and consumed large amounts of background data, leading to increased personal internet expenses, particularly for those working remotely.

Acknowledging the validity of these concerns, Kasriel stated in the memo that Meta’s engineering teams have already implemented major optimizations to reduce the software’s background data usage and battery consumption.

Reassuring employees, he wrote, “When we initially launched this technology, we conducted multiple layers of risk assessments to ensure its safety. Nevertheless, we fully respect the legitimate concerns we have heard regarding the protection of your personal information on work devices, battery life, and your ability to maintain control over this tracking process.”

A Meta spokesperson declined to comment publicly on the internal memo when contacted by Reuters.

Last month, Meta mandated the installation of the tracking software on computers used by its employees in the United States. The company’s stated objective was to collect detailed digital data on employees’ day-to-day work activities in order to develop advanced autonomous AI agents capable of performing corporate and office tasks independently in the future.

The rollout came amid a broader period of internal restructuring and workforce reductions at Meta, fueling employee frustration. Some staff members reportedly criticized the company as an “employee data extraction factory” rather than a conventional technology firm.

Legal and cybersecurity experts believe the monitoring initiative could further complicate Meta’s regulatory and legal challenges within the European Union, where data protection laws impose strict requirements regarding employee privacy and workplace data rights.

DBTech/BMT/OR