{"id":279785,"date":"2026-06-23T13:51:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-23T17:51:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/06\/23\/meta-halts-worker-tracking-for-ai-training-due-to-privacy-fears\/"},"modified":"2026-06-23T14:50:10","modified_gmt":"2026-06-23T18:50:10","slug":"meta-halts-worker-tracking-for-ai-training-due-to-privacy-fears","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/06\/23\/meta-halts-worker-tracking-for-ai-training-due-to-privacy-fears\/","title":{"rendered":"Meta halts worker tracking for AI training due to privacy fears"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/articles\/cq615g3z36po\">Meta halts worker tracking for AI training due to privacy fears<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/articles\/cq615g3z36po\">https:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/articles\/cq615g3z36po<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Publish Date: <a href=\"publish_date]\">2026-06-23 13:51:00<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Source Domain: <a href=\"www.bbc.co.uk\">www.bbc.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Meta has paused a new company-wide program of tracking its employees&#8217; computer usage which has been plagued by internal frustration.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The program was started only two months ago as part of an effort by Meta to gather data on how people used computers, including mouse clicks and keystrokes, that could be used to train artificial intelligence (AI) models.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">It was met immediately with upset from employees who were to have their every online action at work tracked and recorded, but also concerned about where the data was going and how it would be protected.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Meta halted the program on Monday after realising some of the collected data had been left potentially accessible to anyone inside the company.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">A Meta spokesman confirmed to the BBC that the program, named internally the Model Capability Initiative (MCI), was &#8220;on pause for now&#8221; as the company investigates the issue.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;We have no indication at this time that any data was improperly accessed by Meta employees,&#8221; the spokesman added.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The pause follows weeks of blow-back from workers at the company, led by billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, to being tracked at work.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">In an initial response to worker frustration \u2013 which was displayed in part through a petition signed by nearly 2,000 Meta workers demanding that the MCI program be cancelled \u2013 Meta said it would allow workers to not be tracked for up to 30 minutes at a time.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;That was just an attempt at damage control,&#8221; one current employee told the BBC. The person asked not to be identified.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Another Meta employee, who also asked not to be identified, said that while a lot of technical workers inside the company are open to the idea of improving its AI models and being more competitive in a field dominated by Anthropic and OpenAI, the fact that tracking &#8220;was forced on us, there was no consent&#8221; left people angry.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;I&#8217;ve never seen morale here so bad,&#8221; the employee said.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">In addition to the tracking program, frustration inside Meta has grown as it has done extensive layoffs, and reorganised&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/articles\/cq615g3z36po\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Meta halts worker tracking for AI training due to privacy fears https:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/articles\/cq615g3z36po Publish Date: 2026-06-23&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":279787,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/ichef.bbci.co.uk\/ace\/branded_news\/1200\/cpsprodpb\/f1db\/live\/ef7d0940-6f28-11f1-adf9-6fa2b518a522.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[84],"class_list":["post-279785","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-privacy","tag-tracking"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279785"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=279785"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279785\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":279789,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279785\/revisions\/279789"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/279787"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=279785"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=279785"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=279785"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}