Meta Exposed Data Internally From Its Controversial Employee-Tracking Program
Meta Exposed Data Internally From Its Controversial Employee-Tracking Program
https://www.wired.com/story/meta-accidentally-let-employees-access-each-others-keystroke-data/
Publish Date: 2026-06-22 16:28:00
Source Domain: www.wired.com
Meta left potentially sensitive information collected from employee laptops accessible to anyone inside the company, according to an internal security notice seen by WIRED and three current employees familiar with the issue.
The data, which was collected as part of a divisive initiative to train artificial intelligence models, is believed to include keystrokes, mouseclicks, and content displayed on the computer screens of Meta’s US employees.
Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton initially confirmed to WIRED that the company is investigating the security issue. As this story was being published, he added that Meta is pausing the data collection program indefinitely. “We have carefully designed this program with privacy safeguards and while we have no indication at this time that any data was improperly accessed by Meta employees, we’re pausing it while we investigate,” Clayton says.
The security notice sent out Monday indicated that “employee data across 45,000 hive tables,” had been exposed. Those tables included employee activity such as “full prompts and transcriptions, private conversations, people and performance data,” according to documents viewed by WIRED.
Some employees at Meta quickly seized on the security failure, saying in internal forums that it validated concerns they had raised when the company began tracking workers’ corporate laptops in April as part of a program known as the Model Capability Initiative.
Comments about the incident posted on internal forums Monday included questions about how Meta’s privacy reviews failed to prevent the breach, and whether everyone whose data was potentially exposed will be allowed to attend a meeting going over what went wrong, according to posts seen by WIRED.
In one internal forum where staffers are known to trade jokes, an employee posted a meme from The Office of the character Jim Halpert holding a sign that reads, “0 days since our last nonsense.”
Sources at Meta, who were not authorized to speak…
