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Comment by 2ndorderthought | Hacker News Reader

As much as it's funny to dunk on meta this type of surveillance is becoming the norm. Failed start ups are selling all their emails, chats, commits, etc for companies to train on. Most job offers now come with statements about how you don't have right to your likeness, or your personal network I think most people assume that's for photo ops, but ... Yea. I expect more and more of this. products and product features rolling out with this as a focus

Companies have shown us that IP going to AI providers is acceptable. Once you cross that line your thought workers are assets not people.

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> As much as it's funny to dunk on meta this type of surveillance is becoming the norm.

It already is illegal in developed and civilised countries

Well I see no effort for it in the US. So, keep everyone there in your thoughts and prayers. It's going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

They said developed AND civilized countries...

This sort of surveillance is only possible in civilized societies.

Yeah the dunk was obvious

You never really owned what you typed or said at work in to their laptops, into their accounts using their software.

Only because you live in a rigged economic system.

Idk in the US but in France you are allowed to have personal data on your work computer.

Though you have to label it as personal (like creating a « Personal » folder or label and your employer can still access it in case of suspicion but he must do it in your physical presence and accompanied with a witness, generally a representative of the employees.

So you theoretically don’t have full privacy on this computer but you can’t be sanctioned for this usage.

Same in Germany, although the employer can forbid this but needs to do this explicitly. Most employers don't forbid personal data on work machines or using your work email for personal things.

I don't think we have sweeping regulations about it, at least in California.

Most companies I've worked at have a policy of some "reasonable personal use" being permitted. The concern is usually focused on the other way around: Companies do not want their IP on your personal machines.

They can certainly look at whatever is on their own machines, however, regardless if it is your personal data or not.

One large caveat: If you do any work on your company's equipment, they may possibly own it, no matter how relevant it is to the company. It's one of the legal tests used to judge the ownership of your work.

It is even worse in France: if you code open source "on the side" of you work, at home, the company which employs you may claim the copyrights of it. I had to add explicit exclusion of this claim of copyrights in my job contracts to protect my personal work.

That was a few years back, dunno if that was fixed.

AFAIK it's the same in the USA, that's why one of the first questions when interviewing with a company is to ask them about their moonlighting policy if you do want to work on a side project.

> AFAIK it's the same in the USA

It varies by state in the USA. Some states have strong protections for work you do "on your own time, on your own equipment, that isn't connected to your work." Others, not so much...

That is not correct; assuming you are not using an employer’s equipment on employer’s time, and/or working on what the employer pays you to do for them or are working on something that is competing and a few other reasonable caveats.

It’s actually quite reasonable and logical.

https://french-business-law.com/french-legislation-art/artic...

As far as I was told, this is not enough, you have to add extra legal care, even more if you are on an 'executive' type job contract, and you have to double that if there is "too much" connection/"look-a-like", between the software at work and the open source software you contribute to "at home".

On an french executive like contract, the boundary between "at home" and "at work" is very, very blurry.

This is common in North America too. In Canada, people really should be going through their personal projects and getting a moonlighting clause added before they sign any employment agreements. Employment has gotten tough so a lot of juniors aren’t doing this with their first jobs and we’ll start to see the ramifications of that in about five or ten years.

Can depend on the field too. I work in drug discovery and if the FDA was to request data that requires my computer they would have access to everything I had on it...Including my texts if I happened to log in to my personal apple account since it's a Mac.

That's a very good point, agreed.

Reasonable personal use does not at all in any universe imply privacy from a personal perspective.

Is the same reason why they have to say reasonable.

It’s best to have separate devices so they just don’t have the intelligence about you. That can be permanent, left behind, and then increasingly possibly available to AI models forever.

I mean, even if there’s no law to handle this it’s a pretty shitty thing to do, don’t you think?

Sure, but our employers weren't selling our intermediate contributions to third parties in the past.

The workers have always been assets though. They turn JIRA tickets into money. Any notion a company would treat a person as a human being and not a means to an end is unfounded, full-stop. The company is a machine that makes money. Machines do not have feelings.

Machines don't have feelings. But if a human is subjected to machine treatment there should be safe guards. Otherwise we all may as well live in goo filled tubes like in the matrix. At some point we have to decide what is fair treatment for human beings, similar to how we decide fair treatment for lab rats and lab puppies.

Would it benefit neural link to dog food their employees? What if there was a 5% chance of death. What if the employees signed in the dotted line anyway. Someone might say, sure that's fair play. Others might say as a society we shouldn't allow people to be treated as assets.

Is it reasonable to change someone's job description to having every action they take be subjected to company ownership? Depends on who you ask I guess.

Right.

https://thecorporation.com/

We live in a society. Worker rights are a thing. Human rights are a thing. This should not be allowed.

"Companies have shown us that IP going to AI providers is acceptable" This is where I'm expecting future collision; you can't both value IP for it's training value, and yet devalue it for the actual sources of IP (people owning their own likenesses or orgs collecting data from their own activity)

It's going to cause a major break at some point, probably sooner than later.

> Most job offers now come with statements about how you don't have right to your likeness

[citation needed]

It's pretty common, Google it. Here is a website that will help your ai draft job offers with example clauses for it

https://www.lawinsider.com/clause/right-to-use-employees-nam...

I recall that being in my employment contract.

Already 10 years ago, I got an email from a webshop I used to use once, informing me they were closing down. They'd happily sell the customer database to me, if I were interested. Mind you, they were so desperate that they made this offer to all their customers. Its anecdotal, and only tangentially related. But my point is, companies blatantly selling your data isn't exactly a new thing, and not really AI related either. They are doing this since a long time, but usually got less publicity.

It's true. I think the difference is that now it has slightly different implications as well as scale.

This goes back to 1995 when I was just finishing up grade twelve but it left quite the taste in my mouth. The web industry was just starting to kick off in 1995 and people were opening up web design firms. At the time, young people had part time jobs and while my attempts to pump gas had all ended in rejection, I managed to get a job doing ‘web design’ which at the time meant typing things like <tr> and <td> hundreds of times a page.

There were issues. One of the biggest was that it was 1994-1995, I lived in Regina and that city was not an early adopter. But the guy who ran the company had us doing all kinds of stuff for him.

Then he ran out of money. Since he couldn’t pay his staff he tried to sell his almost non existent client list to a competitor. I got a little lost on the details because they didn’t really make sense but apparently I was supposed to work for free for six months so he could sell his client list and then pay me.

I was 17 and really badly wanted to buy a Pentium processor before I started university so I was tempted but my parents had to explain that that was the single dumbest thing they had ever heard. I didn’t get a Pentium processor until 1997 because of that dude and I’m still a little bitter.

Moral is, buy the client list so the nerds can get to 90mhz. :)

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