Meta Big Brother: Mark Zuckerberg’s firm starts tracking employees,
Meta has revealed plans to start tracking its employees’ keystrokes and mouse clicks.
The tool, known as the Model Capability Initiative (MCI), will run on Meta’s computers and internal apps to harvest data as workers complete their daily tasks.
MCI will even take screenshots of content on employees’ screens to see exactly what they are doing at all times.
Their data will be used to train the company’s latest generation of artificial intelligence (AI) models, according to a memo sent to employees on Tuesday.
The goal is to help Meta’s AIs learn how to interact with computers, copying how humans use drop–down menus and keyboard shortcuts.
The Memo, seen by Reuters, says: ‘This is where all Meta employees can help our models get better simply by doing their daily work.’
However, Meta’s staff are concerned that their smallest actions are being used to train the AIs that may eventually replace them.
One employee told the BBC that the plan felt ‘very dystopian’, adding that Meta has ‘become obsessed with AI.’
Meta is planning to start tracking its employees’ keystrokes and mouse clicks in order to train its latest generation of AI models
This comes as Meta embarks on a massive push to upgrade its AI products and integrate the technology into its own systems.
Internally, staff are being pushed to use AI tools as part of their work, even if it slows them down at first.
AI agents are increasingly able to automate large parts of employees’ daily work, but still struggle to perform tasks humans find easy, such as clicking through a menu.
In a separate memo shared yesterday, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth said that the company would accelerate its work on so–called ‘AI for work’.
Mr Bosworth told employees: ‘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.’
He added that the eventual goal was for AIs to ‘automatically see where we felt the need to intervene so they can be better next time’.
A Meta Spokesperson told the Daily Mail: ‘If we’re building agents to help people complete everyday tasks using computers, our models need real examples of how people actually use them — things like mouse movements, clicking buttons, and navigating dropdown menus.
‘To help, we’re launching an internal tool that will capture these kinds of inputs on certain applications to help us train our models. There are safeguards in place to protect sensitive content, and the data is not used for any other purpose’
As CEO Mark Zuckerberg (pictures) pushes towards a bigger internal role for AI, staff were told in a memo that ‘all Meta employees can help our models get better simply by doing their daily work’
While Meta says the data will not be used for performance reviews, the announcement has sparked concerns over escalating corporate surveillance.
Tom Hegarty, head of communications for tech campaign group Foxglove, told the Daily Mail: ‘Facebook content moderators, social media’s critical safety workers, have long warned of facing intense workplace surveillance from Meta.
‘Meta’s moderators in countries including Ghana have described being monitored during every moment on shift.
‘Now it seems this intense surveillance is being rolled across Meta’s global workforce.’
Likewise, Jake Hufurt, head of research and investigations at Big Brother Watch, told the Daily Mail: ‘Any employer monitoring of staff must be strictly limited and proportionate.
‘Companies should not be tracking their staff just to hoover up data to train AI models. Being at work doesn’t mean your employer has carte blanche to treat staff as guinea pigs for data gathering.’
With the threat of large layoffs looming, some Meta employees are concerned that this data collection could threaten their roles in the long run.
One person who recently left the company said the tracking tool was ‘just the latest way they’re shoving AI down everyone’s throat’.
This comes after reports suggested Meta was building an AI clone of Mark Zuckerberg to interact with employees on the CEO’s behalf. Pictured: Zuckerberg’s Metaverse avatar
Meta has already laid off approximately 2,000 employees this year and plans to cut down its global workforce by 10 per cent starting in May.
At the same time, the company has been ploughing vast investments into its AI teams.
Last year, the company spent $14 billion (£10.35 bn) to acquire most of AI rival Scale AI, and poached several top executives to help build its own tools.
Meta also made headlines by handing out some of the biggest contracts ever awarded to AI engineers, with pay packages stretching into the hundreds of millions.
In January of this year, Zuckerberg said that this would be ‘the year that AI dramatically changes the way we work.’
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The company now says it plans to spend $140 billion (£103.5 bn) on AI in 2026, almost twice as much as it spent in 2025.
Meta is even preparing to create an AI clone of Mark Zuckerberg himself to interact with employees on the CEO’s behalf.
Meta has already disclosed its attempts to develop the next generation of photorealistic, AI–powered 3D characters that can speak with people in real time.
However, according to sources familiar with the company, engineers have been told to prioritise creating Zuckerberg’s own 3D replacement.
