According to Reuters, Meta said in an internal memo on Tuesday that it would scale back its plans to collect employee mouse movements, keystrokes and other behavioral data for AI training. The plan had faced strong opposition from employees in the past few weeks.
Meta
Stephane Kasriel, vice president of Meta AI model building "Super Intelligence Laboratory", said in the memo that Meta will add new control options that allow employees to pause data collection for up to 30 minutes at a time and apply for exemptions from participating in the project.
Kasril said the team that developed the software also introduced "a number of optimization measures" to reduce its impact on computer battery life. Previously, Meta employees had complained that the system consumed too much data, causing their home network usage to surge.
“While we remain confident in the privacy measures we put in place when we launched, which have gone through multiple layers of risk review, we’ve heard your concerns about your personal data on your work devices, battery life, and your desire to have more control over when data is collected,” Kasril said.
Meta announced last month that it would install new tracking software on the computers of U.S. employees to record operational data such as mouse movements, clicks, and keyboard inputs, and use this data to train its AI model. This is part of the company's overall AI plan to build AI agents that can perform work tasks autonomously.
As of press time, a Meta spokesperson declined to comment.