Meta to Train AI Through Tracking Workers’ Movements on PC

The US tech conglomerate Meta is finding new ways to incorporate AI into daily work by harvesting its worker behaviour to train new AI agents, after already laying off around 2,000 employees this year.

The company notified its US-based workers on Tuesday about a new tool called Model Capability Initiative (MCI) that will run on their computers and internal apps to log their activities.

Employees will be tracked on the way they work, with keystrokes, mouse movements and even occasional screenshots being recorded, as per internal memos seen by Reuters. 

Meta is implementing the tool in a broader initiative to build AI agents that can perform tasks anonymously in the workplace. 

The new development is not being received well by the staff as they fear micro-management at a time when they already expect more job cuts. 

A new era of surveillance

As per reports, Meta says that the data collected by the MCI will help build agents that assist people with everyday tasks.

“If we are building agents to help people complete everyday tasks using computers, our models need real examples of how people actually use them,” a Meta spokesman highlighted to the BBC.

They ensure that the data will not be used for any other purpose as the tool has safeguards in place to protect sensitive content.

In April, the company launched a frontier-scale system designed to handle complex, multi-step tasks called Muse Spark through its Meta Superintelligence Labs group. 

Data from the new tracker will help Muse Spark learn how to perform professional office tasks by mimicking human computer interactions. This will then support future models from the same lab.

Within workspaces, there has been an increased push for surveillance, particularly during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic when employees were asked to install online monitoring software on their work devices. 

As confirmed by Meta employees, activity on their computer was already accessible to the company. However, the specific tracking and logging of data to train and improve AI tools is a new development.

Mimicking Meta’s consumer tracking 

The company, which owns Instagram and Facebook, is notoriously known for keeping a watchful eye on the online behaviour of its users for sending out targeted advertisements and content. Its workers now feel the similar unease that its users have reported for years. 

Andy Stone, Meta spokesperson and Vice President, claims that the MCI data would not be used for performance assessments or any other purpose other than performance training. 

From being called “dystopian” to fearing security of their jobs amid reports of upcoming layoffs affecting up to 10% of its workforce, there has been much backlash to the news. 

The company is currently on a hiring freeze, with job advertisements on one careers  website going from about 800 listings in March to just seven jobs.

At the start of this year, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s co-founder and chief executive, said that 2026 will be “the year that AI dramatically changes the way we work”. Projects that used to involve big teams are now being accomplished by “a single, very talented person”, he added.

The company plans to spend roughly US$140bn on AI in 2026, almost doubling from what it invested last year.

As Meta employees face the dilemma of potentially training their own replacements, the implementation of the MCI tool suggests that workplace privacy is a thing of the past.