{"id":280592,"date":"2026-06-24T09:55:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-24T13:55:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/06\/24\/meta-pauses-employee-tracker-for-ai-training-amid-privacy-concerns-meta\/"},"modified":"2026-06-24T11:35:09","modified_gmt":"2026-06-24T15:35:09","slug":"meta-pauses-employee-tracker-for-ai-training-amid-privacy-concerns-meta","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/06\/24\/meta-pauses-employee-tracker-for-ai-training-amid-privacy-concerns-meta\/","title":{"rendered":"Meta pauses employee tracker for AI training amid privacy concerns | Meta"},"content":{"rendered":"

Meta pauses employee tracker for AI training amid privacy concerns | Meta<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/technology\/2026\/jun\/24\/meta-pauses-employee-tracker-for-ai-training-amid-privacy-concerns<\/a><\/p>\n

Publish Date: 2026-06-24 09:55:00<\/a><\/p>\n

Source Domain: www.theguardian.com<\/a><\/p>\n

Mark Zuckerberg\u2019s Meta has paused a program that tracked employees\u2019 computer activity amid data privacy concerns and a staff backlash.<\/p>\n

The owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp had introduced a tool that tracked staff keystrokes, mouse clicks and content displayed on computer screens in order to collect data for training its AI models.<\/p>\n

More than 1,600 Meta workers signed a petition against the tool, called the Model Capability Initiative, demanding the company does not harvest \u201cemployee \u2018computer use\u2019 data\u201d.<\/p>\n

The petition said: \u201cCollecting and repurposing this kind of data raises serious concerns around privacy, consent, and trust in the workplace.\u201d<\/p>\n

The tech publication Wired reported this week that MCI data collected from corporate laptops had been accessible to anyone inside the company. It cited an internal security notice that referred to the exposure of data tables including \u201cfull prompts and transcriptions, private conversations, people and performance data\u201d.<\/p>\n

Meta confirmed the program has been paused.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe 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\u2019re pausing it while we investigate,\u201d the company said in a statement.<\/p>\n

Zuckerberg, Meta\u2019s founder and chief executive, had told employees that AI models \u2013 the underlying technology that powers AI tools such as Meta\u2019s chatbots \u2013 learn from \u201cwatching really smart people do things\u201d, according to an account of an internal company meeting.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe average intelligence of the people who are at this company is significantly higher than the average set of people that you can get to do tasks,\u201d he said, adding that the coding skills of Meta engineers would dramatically improve a model\u2019s coding abilities.<\/p>\n

Zuckerberg is pouring vast sums into an AI drive at Meta and is spending up to $145bn (\u00a3110bn) at the company in capital expenditure this year, with much of it going…<\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Meta pauses employee tracker for AI training amid privacy concerns | Meta https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/technology\/2026\/jun\/24\/meta-pauses-employee-tracker-for-ai-training-amid-privacy-concerns Publish Date:…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":280593,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/i.guim.co.uk\/img\/media\/c402f0b1a58456ecab119945fa337da0e24f541b\/372_5_4641_3712\/master\/4641.jpg?width=1200&height=630&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&precrop=40:21,offset-x50,offset-y0&overlay-align=bottom%2Cleft&overlay-width=100p&overlay-base64=L2ltZy9zdGF0aWMvb3ZlcmxheXMvdGctZGVmYXVsdC5wbmc&enable=upscale&s=04365c84893f94b5e35a6012877e2887","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-280592","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-privacy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280592"}],"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=280592"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280592\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":280594,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280592\/revisions\/280594"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/280593"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=280592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=280592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=280592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}