In the US, there's the expectation that when you use an employer-provided device that any and all activity on it can be fully monitored/recorded and used against the employee for any reason. In practice, however, few people worry about reasonable amounts web-surfing, being on hacker-news or doing life-activities on their work machines. Oh, here I am on hacker-news when I should be working.

With AI, this changes significantly since the man can now employ a robot to categorize and finely scrutinize every little thing with the pretext of "training" (to take your job). We will soon have to brace ourselves for an absolute draconian level of tracking.

Why don't you quit this very toxic company, and start working at another place or even on your own? I genuinely don't understand...

Let just Meta die!

"You can..."

"Yes...we are allowed that privilege"

I remember feeling outraged for the poor schmucks working at the adjacent call center. They had metered "bt time" - that is bath room time -- and were constantly monitored. This is early 90s (the golden age of being a programmer in US, imo) and our field was fun, lucrative, and really quite unlike any other whitish collar profession. Who would have thunk it that one day we would end up being treated like 'lowly and disposable' call center human resources.

So, whenever one of my employees opts out of surveillance for 30 minutes... is exactly when they secretly get maximum surveillance attention. Because what is that weasel up to.

Humorously, when an employee thinks they are off-the-record is actually when my special security unit is operating off-the-record. With questionable methods. (On-the-record, they spend all their time making employee badges and infosec reminder posters for the kitchenettes.)

53 minutes per week.

53 minutes. Not even a full hour. It was specific enough that you knew some bureaucrat went out of their way to hyper optimize this, creating a maximum slap-in-your-face effect.

This 30 minutes thing feels the same way.

The best part? Strikes work!

30 minutes of opt out should be enough for anyone. Let's all praise Meta and Mark Zuckerberg for their thoughtfulness, kindness, and empathy!

Sometimes using a company device is even a risk for the company... They shoot themselves in the foot by allowing IT to silently remote takeover/view a device, or install key loggers.

Well, in 1984 the protagonist learns after a while, that inner party members had the amazing perk of being able to turn off the mandatory surveillance screen for up to 30 minutes. But I guess in this case the workers still will be tracked by the usual Meta tracking that applies to everyone surfing the internet.

I get that the money is good but holy hell I don't understand why anyone still works at Meta.

Meta’s biggest culture problem is definitely “not enough masculine energy”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circle_(Eggers_novel)

In many cases they pay really well I heard, so I'm not too bothered by it. If you are a high paid specialist and you do not like how you are treated, you can go and find another, friendlier, job.

For low paid workers I have more sympathy: if you have no options but to be tracked and pee in bottles and ... whatnot; that's just sad. We need better labour law to protect them.

Also all corporates that did anti-unionizing and never got punished for this are simply criminals operating above the law at this point. We know many FAANG++ did it.

If you take a job there today, what the hell is wrong with you?

"Employees are able to turn off tracking".

Sure, but there is a power imbalance, and employees will come to understand ( although never stated in any handbook ) that the rate at which they disable it will be taken into account in performance reviews.

Just like "unlimited PTO" is not a benefit, because employees self-regulate their use down to less than they'd get if they negotiated a fixed amount.

It's a twisted legal trick to get out of an obligation.

The silver lining(If you can call it that) of the latest slump in tech employment is that it has laid bare the reality of the tech oligarchs. Someone should set up a website to catalog this behaviour so that these corporations and leaders can't easily sweep this under the rug in the future.

The message is: Fuck you if you're a software developer. Your skills are irrelevant. You should be grateful that we haven't made conditions even worse.

That's just too bad and Meta does not care. If these employees don't like it, just leave Meta. (They won't).

But that idea was shot down real fast by the unions, who informed the employer that it with great likelihood also would clash with data protection laws, and GDPR (this was not in the US). So it was quickly abandoned. Among workers that was one of the most dystopian ideas we had heard of.

Quite objectively, the track record for management demonstrating bad faith and lying about this is deep and long.

If they deny your exemption, make a tool that every 30 minutes fakes a bunch of nonsensical keystrokes for a few seconds, then automatically request another 30 minute pause. If they ever find out and confront you about it, say you’ve always heard Meta leadership encourages “moving fast and breaking things” and “asking for forgiveness instead of permission”, so you were only following the company’s ethos.

Or, you know, quit Facebook if you have the means.