Musks xAI pressed employees to install surveillance software on personal laptops | Hacker News Reader

Musks xAI pressed employees to install surveillance software on personal laptops

businessinsider.com

67 pointsc42028 comments

> The company supplies some workers with company-issued Chromebooks, but many workers use their personal devices for the role

This is the crux of the issue - xAI allows employees to use personal laptops for corporate work.

This is a MASSIVE breach of internal security operations. Either mandate no personal laptop use or require VDI to access corporate resources.

> In the lead up to the roll-out, tutors were initially told that the company had run out of Chromebooks, and it was unclear when they would be restocked, people familiar with the guidance told BI

This is just pure sloppiness from their IT org, who are likely dealing with some amount of micromanagement from up the leadership chain.

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It really isn't that expensive to procure corporate laptops from an MSP like WWT, especially for a firm like xAI that is trying to raise a round at a $200B valuation. There's a reason Musk was managed out of PayPal fairly early. Even Peter Thiel couldn't stand him.

For those who, like me, couldn’t parse “VDI,” it likely means virtual desktop infrastructure, which makes sense - security concerns of using a personal laptop are largely mitigated if Remote Desktop sessions are used for corporate work and no local software js used for corporate work and the OS has limited visibility in corporate data.

Who uses a Chromebook for dev work? No surprise employees want to bring in their own laptops.

Why would they not use a company laptop in the first place?

"They ran out" is no excuse

> The company supplies some workers with company-issued Chromebooks, but many workers use their personal devices for the role

How is this even a thing? Are there seriously employees at a "tech company" bringing their own hardware? This is madness

People willing to work for Musk are probably willing to put up with more adverse conditions than is usual or standard at other orgs.

They are mostly visa workers so it’s not like they have much choice, if they don’t they go back to their country

I rarely see this talked about - that H1B inherently creates a power imbalance in favour of the employer. It enables them to stomp on workers’ rights and pay less. All according to plan I’m sure.

Not disagreeing with the imbalance, but I know about it (I don’t live in USA) because I’ve seen it discussed on HN and other discussion forums quite a few times.

Seems to be an issue in the tech industry more so than elsewhere. H1Bs are common in investment banking, management consulting, science labs, university jobs, really any sector where foreign graduates of US universities are hired.

I’m surprised that a “tech company” provides a Chromebook instead of a laptop.

ChromeOS is more than enough for lots of roles. Even for devs (backend, web and android etc) it should be good enough if you have good enough CPU, RAM and storage.

Sure and water is enough for hydration so their cafeteria has no actual coffee or what.

If you'd force me (a dev used to work on a blazingly fast Linux machine) to use this I'd just be inclined to look for a job elsewhere. Not sure if that was in your interest as a corp.

Probably the most secure client system you can get these days. The purpose of the laptop is to ssh.

Do you not consider a Chromebook to be a type of laptop? Is that because of the form factor or the OS?

Not really, I was at a small one which allowed it, it was bliss, although I used a company one. In the end, when it folded, i bought it from them.

It's not a great line to blur for either side of the business, IMO. Property issues all the way down with power imbalance for flavor. For brevity I'll gloss over the security/liability concerns for BYOD/them...

Here's my anecdote: had to prove I didn't use what was their hardware to create something I released for free. I lost more in frustration alone than that saved. Nevermind the postage.

Time and place matters, as always.

They can provide what they want to monitor. Now: I'll buy a discount device, I won't offer my own.

Quadruple for phones. Say the business wants to call outside of work. It can afford differential, payment for that device, and the plan to connect it. I'll still choose when it's on, human after all.

I mean, it's run by _Elon Musk_; I'm not sure why you'd expect it to be run competently.

I'm under the impression from the article that these are for the people RLHFing the model, not the engineers

https://archive.ph/qUW2A

https://archive.is/qUW2A

I mean, they could just choose to work elsewhere, but they chose to be morally bankrupt to work at xAI, so they can just accept the software and move on?

This should be the least of their problems these days, given waves hands at Grok. The overinflated paychecks make up for the lack of ethics.

Why is it “morally bankrupt” to work at xAi?

> The company has said it will only use the system to monitor URL and application visits during designated work hours, according to the document. According to its website, Hubstaff can also track mouse movement and keystrokes.

> "This new tool serves to streamline work processes, provide clearer insights into daily tutoring activities, and ensure resources align with Human Data priorities," the company's human resources team said in a mass email to employees.

> The software, which requires workers to clock in and out, would not track activity on the laptop outside of work hours, the document said.

very well intended (smh)

Elon Musk declared that none of his employees could work remotely. So this is an admission that he has failed to achieve this goal.

I think this is like mass data labelers, including in other countries or other low cost areas.

A sensationalist headline intended to get clicks from the anti-Musk zeitgeist

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