Petition against Meta's employee training data collection for ML models | Hacker News Reader

Petition against Meta's employee training data collection for ML models

mcipetition.com

Try unionizing rather than just asking nicely.

It's so hard to do that but it's really the only way. I had this idea that tech companies should organize _each others_ unions. Like Google employees should organize Meta's union and visa versa so no one is "sacrificing their career" by doing it.

Or living in Europe where workers have actual rights.

...gained through unionizing.

Don't worry, it's happening

Signing this sounds like a good way to get fired. Executive in corporations gets to make the decisions. Employment is at will, if you don’t like it you get to leave otherwise you’re not fulfilling your contract

NAL but it may be protected activity to improve working conditionals. I would guess Meta leadership doesn’t actually care very much if someone signed it. And typically the people making firing decisions are not necessarily the ones that want the AI training data anyway.

also NAL and i think you’re right, the petition even says as much. but at-will employment means they can fire you for basically any other reason, and they probably have at least 10 to choose from at any given time.

The NLRB isn't entirely toothless, and retaliatory firing is actually illegal.

Sure if you've signed this you've have added your name to a list, while someone in HR has added your name to another.

Yup, Dilbert's "easiest round of layoffs ever".

People who are focusing on whether we should have sympathy for Meta employees here are missing the point.

Meta employees have some of the strongest bargaining power in our industry. This particular imposition is undesirable to almost everyone. There is no upside in it for employees.

Therefore, if Meta employees can be forced to accept it, everyone will be. And you'd better believe that there will be a flood of companies happy to set this up for your employer at your workplace.

That's why, as someone who wouldn't consider working at Meta for ethical reasons, I'm hoping this pushback succeeds. A win for Meta here throws the floodgates wide open. A loss helps put the brakes on a bit.

Furthermore, collective action that starts like this (and keeps pressure up) is much more effective than a bunch of individuals quitting their jobs. That's why employers would much prefer the latter when they're up to no good.

> Therefore, if Meta employees can be forced to accept it, everyone will be.

Meta also has a strong bargaining position. The attractiveness of the job is almost entirely money, which is pretty universal, so they can quite easily replace individuals. Other (less wealthy) companies might rely on goodwill and sense of belonging or purpose to retain employees, which weakens their ability to do things like this.

100%. Canaries in the coal mine.

Randomly I was thinking about how to "prove" you are a distinct engineer who works at a company without revealing your identity.

I feel like labor organizers should offer employee verification as a free service to get people to sign who fear retaliation. Essentially upload your W2, get a token, sign petition with token. Or maybe just mail out a QR sticker to place in an employee-only area...

> Indexing by search engines is fully suppressed by robots.txt

Ah yes, the companies that have ignored robots.txt to scrape your website for 20+ years will now not totally, most definitely not ignore (wink wink) polite requests to not use your data for AI training. Also, haven't Meta employees been complicit in getting teenagers addicted to social media and violations of PII until they got caught?

Respect goes out to mathematicians and their Leiden Declaration, which is an actual level-headed approach given the complexities of AI training and usage.

The way I look at it is this:

There is an entity that provides product/service and makes money. A lot of money. Like mind boggling sums of money. That entity has made a deal with a set of humans to give some of that money (which for the humans is very large and or at least hard to ignore) in exchange for their time and skills. The deal is mutual.

This entity is now changing the deal somewhat and the set of humans don’t like it. But not to the point of walking away from the deal. They are used to the money and walking away from it has severe repercussions that only some can absorb. Most can’t absorb. So these humans are doing what they can to alter the recently altered deal as much as possible.

The entity knows for the most part these humans have little to no leverage. There is an extremely rare (almost black swan event) chance that the entity could lose its leverage. The black swan event is that the almost entire set of humans that it made the deal with walks away from the deal. In other words the set of humans transforms from elements of a set in one homogeneous entity or at least behaves like one. Beside this the set of humans individually have very little real leverage. This letter which is from a subset of the original set of humans is an example of an attempt to become a relatively small entity.

Here is the kicker - the original entity is actually emergent entity that emerged from within the set of humans in the first place. Each human in the set has a weight and it’s unequal. And ultimately since from a set of humans multiple entities can emerge entities are simply the sum of weights of the humans that make up that subset. The entity with the most weight(not most humans) has the most leverage.

Does this situation really matter?? Especially since It’s just (largely) two entities and Given the number of entities that emerge and exist from the larger set of 7 or 8 billion humans?

Humans generally relate to other humans that Are like them. If you are a human who is part of a similar low leverage entity you will sympathize with the humans who don’t like the new deal. If you are a human part of a very high leverage entity you probably can’t sympathize with the low leverage entities as much. In the large scheme of things it really dosnt matter for us HN outsiders. And for those humans within meta all I will say is know which entity you are part and if you don’t like the leverage it has, keep working towards changing the situation you are in.

> almost entire set of humans that it made the deal with walks away from the deal

You missed mentioning a million new humans will gladly walk into the deal.

This is a list of 1600 people who should be alrady looking out because meta won't be after this signature.

It’s implied in someways I would say. that’s why these folks creating any meaningful leverage is a black swan event. Say all of them walk away and meta can get a million new people it’s still a massive risk for the meta (entity) as they may never be able to recover fully. The million new people when band to gather will not form the same larger entity that was existing earlier that made a lot of money. They are not going to be productive day one or year one. What will emerge is a new entity and it could make even more money or even less money as things may never be the same. And that’s a large risk that Meta may or may not take. But without leverage created by banding together / complete solidarity Meta will never be forever to face the risk of it being transformed into a completely different entity that may or may not be as successful as it’s today. And that’s the power of leverage.

I wouldn’t put it past meta leadership to just fire the lot of them for daring to make a “demand” of their betters. The only thing that might restrain them is employment law, but they have good lawyers and might find a way around it.

And meta engineers will never bargain collectively. If you’ve spent time there you understand that it is some of the least fertile ground in the world for such ideas. Anyone who entertained thoughts of collectivism, or in fact anything beyond naked self-interest, has probably left some time ago.

It’s that self interest is what got them to meta in the first place. These people are highly skilled and smart at what they do. They worked probably extremely hard for a large swath of their life to get where they are with meta. It’s one of those classic what got you here won’t get you there scenarios. Self interest has its limits (and so does collectivism). The real intelligence is in knowing when one has stoped working for you and when it’s working against you. Self interest / collectivism etc These are all just tools. We as humans are best when our indentity is that of a tools user (and not that of a single tool user - it’s possible and you may be rewarded for it well but it has its limits and it certainly confines what you can do has a human. It’s a limiting way to live at best )

"Do I need to worry about potential future employers finding this?

No.

Indexing by search engines is fully suppressed by robots.txt and <meta> headers (not the company Meta, here it refer to an HTML tag). A potential employer searching your name will never see this page via search engines like Google or Bing."

For what it's worth, it does say right before and in colors "NOTE: Your name WILL BE VISIBLE TO THE WORLD."

I did a double take when reading that part too, but if you're a Meta employee then you should be able to understand the implications of those technical measures.

"Do I need to worry about potential future employers finding this?

No.

The author assumes some employees are not familiar with <meta> HTML elements and might confuse them with the name of their employer

HN commenter: "I did a double take when reading that part too, but if you're a Meta employee then you should be able to understand the implications of those technical measures."

Are there Meta employees who don't undetstand HTML <meta> elements

Would these employees understand "technical measures"

unionize stoopiiiid

a documentable unionization effort also overrides the “at will” part of getting laid off

The only right course of action for Meta Mates is to eventually be hired by other firms who then squeeze everything out of them. Repent your sins and all that.

Soz but zero sympathy if you chose to work there.

Petition by resigning. Tomorrow. Stop supporting this company.

Quoting Zuckerberg on Meta’s code of conduct is hilarious.

If I was Mark my answer would be “or what?” These people already work at a vile company. Which means they sold out already. If what mark does to other people doesn’t bother them they probably won’t have the backbone to leave if he says pound sand. “Oh it’s ok if you do it to other people just not me.” Get bent.

If this is what you get for selling out, just imagine what those of us who didn't sell out can expect? People sell out in order to get better conditions for themselves. Furthermore, this monitoring only strengthens Meta's ability to effectively surveil the rest of us.

> People sell out in order to get better conditions for themselves.

I agree in part about what you're saying but think it's more money for FAANG+ employees. Sure the conditions can be or were good but the primary motivation is financial gain and I think the proverbial employee-frog can tolerate quite a bit of increasingly hot water if paid enough.

lol people sell out for a paycheck. That doesn’t mean better conditions.

His answer was “or what?”. And then enough people they cared about quit, and now you’re seeing the articles about them apologizing, saying they care, etc.

So the petition didn’t work, exactly, but served as a warning: employees said, fix this (or else). Mark said “or else what?”, and enough people said “I quit” to make them look bad.

Good on them. Now go make the world a better place somewhere else besides that shithole company.

I hope the vocal cynicism expressed in the "told ya so" replies weren't developed after reading the list of names.

>Surveillance for thee but not for me...

Yeah, no thanks (or "how the turn tables")

It’s a bit hard to feel sympathetic here. Those signing this petition actively enable and profit from one of the most pervasive surveillance networks ever built.

Funny how much easier it is to tolerate something when it only affects other people.

Presumably the employees didn't ask for this, now they have to choose between accepting this and not having a job.

You could argue they knew the company was horrible when they signed the deal with the devil, but this kind of bait and switch isn't the typical employment relationship; there is room for some sympathy.

We’re supposed to have sympathy for techbros making half a million or more a year because.. they have to have their computer use monitored? Not even getting into the numerous list of unethical behavior of meta..

What a bizarre timeline..

I find Metas work very unethical but me but I think they should have basic workers rights still. Like yes what Meta is doing is legal and it’s at will work, but this level of surveillance feels like something the law didn’t really anticipate.

I don’t disagree. It’s dehumanizing, and they have a legitimate complaint. In almost any other context I’d be on the side of the workers here. I just have a hard time seeing Meta employees as innocent or helpless bystanders.

Yeah, this is very much a "leopards ate my face" moment.

> I think they should have basic workers rights still

You make it look like they are underpaid poor manual workers.

Those are people that chose to make >500k$/year by joining a company that is known to be one of the most toxic tech companies. Mos tof those people had probably multiple offers ad decided to optimize for money besides anything else. I have a hard time to feel sympathy or petition for their "worker's rights"

This feels overly cynical. My long-time friend took a job at Meta (over equally compelling financial alternatives) because the manager pitched the team and growth prospects well. (Meta turned out to be quite disappointing on these fronts. I never heard money as an important factor for joining or for leaving.)

In general, the kind of people who get an offer from any particular big tech company probably can get similar money elsewhere, so it's unlikely to be as big a factor as you suggest.

Workers are workers. We have so much more in common with one another than we do with the capital class.

Turning against a worker because they are doing better than another worker is giving in the divide and rule.

Historically, this is exactly how factory owners tried to get the white and Black workers to schism rather than unionize.

Workers deserve workers rights, and we should have solidarity towards all workers.

I guess man. This kind of doesn't apply to workers who are enabling the bourgeoisie state (cops, programmers making systems to feed data to the NSA, etc.)

I ... actually agree with this. But I think we gotta deliberately select who that applies to. Is it everyone at Meta? Like, are we all culpable for our employers sins? Or are we all squeezed by a system where we gotta work to eat and the people who decide what jobs exist are the capital class?

Like, obviously cops aren't workers, but what level of culpability does a person working in Meta's disability accommodations team have? I dunno. Hard question.

The thing about workers' rights, is that they are rights. They don't go away when you get paid more, and they apply to everyone.

But that is also the thing about everyone's rights. No one should be subject to Facebook's surveillance, whether they work for Facebook or not.

I think the level of surveillance Meta inflicts on the population at large is also something the law didn't anticipate. The solution is new laws that illegalize broad swaths of what Meta currently does.

The workers deserve better conditions without full accountability for leadership's decisions.

If Meta's workers were organized enough to improve their conditions, they could organize to shift company mission and tactics. They are nowhere near organized enough.

People uphold a million cruel systems every day, their sort of hypocrisy is so common I've found it just to accept that it's how humans work (especially in a situation like this where their paycheck requires them to not see all the privacy problems they all support). I know I'm hypocritical about a bunch of stuff in my life.

Your perspective might be the more reasonable one but the way I see it, the hypocrisy is frustrating but it's sort of like getting mad at a dog for barking through a fence (dogs gonna dog) so I personally don't find it hard to be sympathetic still.

...it's the intrinsic nature of the programmer to have no scruples and work for the shittiest company that can employ them because it offers a big paycheck?

Basically, yes.

Programmers aren't that special once they get a mortgage and a family.

I've found that everyone has some hypocrisies that they cling to (it's really hard to see it in yourself). I believe I do a better job of it that Facebook employees, it would be really hard to be more blatantly hypocritical than this, but it's not like I don't make similar errors all the time.

Especially on a post about them doing something decent, I can accept they are obviously hypocritical and just not be concerned with it right now.

Edit: for something like this I think about the advice "don't punish someone for doing what you want them to do". This is Facebook employees publicly signing a pro-privacy document. It's obviously self serving so it would be weird to really praise them as people who protect privacy but I'm happy to support them in this regardless.

If this is "how humans work", do you feel sympathy for the Nazis who were "just following orders"?

it's not about symathy. Tactically, would you like your enemy to have this kind of control over its employees ? if the answer is no, you should support them

Nobody should be strong armed in to training models whose intention is replacing them.

Technology has become a societal torture device and AI is the largest power grab in history.

How dare humans be able to leverage their reasoning for a wage. To the machines I say!

Surely anyone working at Meta sold their soul long ago. Do yourself a favour and quit.

"Journalists and others: we request that you do not directly link to the site on the web, social media, etc."

Petition? What do you think this is, a democracy?

All* corporations are dictatorships, and you're disposable machinery in one.

Irony is off the charts here, given what you helped build.

*not Mondragon, but like, pretty much all.

What does a petition have to do with democracy? They are not suggesting putting it to a vote. They have a grievance with authority and are attempting to show how widespread that grievance is with signatures of those aggrieved.

Also historically something like a petition seems to always be the first step in any kind of pressure campaign. It's a relatively low stakes (but not completely risk free) way to count support.

> first step in any kind of pressure campaign

Not how corporate politics work.

> low stakes

Not how corporate politics work.

Petitioning a king is very traditional.

Have they tried to stage a strike and block the road?

In Meta Quest of course

Oh man, a petition. Now stage a walk out, maybe a protest. They’re all equally effective.

If you think walkouts or protests don’t do anything, you might want to brush up on history. Or maybe discover it. Google is your friend. I mean everything from suffrage to organized labor to civil rights in the US was the result of massive coordinated action. You do know that right? Maybe even read up on Gandhi, or more recently French labor protests.

If you think they’re effective in this current day and age you should also read the news.

Thanks for the sermon though.

> Google is your friend

But really, it's more like tolerated business partner, right?

I've been using Kagi for the last year, and it is like an actually helpful business partner.

Even if you use another one, we need to break the myth that Google is the only option out there.

If you're not paying Google, you're the product. Same with Facebook. Both of these companies are data mining/harvesting and advertising.

I'm also a Kagi user, but the index they mainly use is Google's. So I am paying for a good UI, a couple of nice features, and a frontend/proxy.

The only independent index I am aware of, is Mojeek.

I use Kagi. They actually use Google but with a different front end. I don’t plan to stop using Kagi.

Glad to hear you're also enjoying it!

Just for anyone else reading, I would say it is inaccurate to say it is a different front-end over Google. They pull from a range of search engines, but also run their own web crawlers and indices. It's the closest thing to a fully new search engine we've had so far.

That’s funny. On the nose. :)

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