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

irishcoffee

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

dvt

> 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.

supertroop

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.

foltik

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.

btbuildem

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.

mattoxic

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.

phyzome

Try unionizing rather than just asking nicely.

4fffs

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.

tdeck

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.

cmoski

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

nbardy

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

JSR_FDED

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

yieldcrv

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

postsantum

Have they tried to stage a strike and block the road? In Meta Quest of course

quietthrow

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.

steele

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

newtonianrules

Petition by resigning. Tomorrow. Stop supporting this company.

siliconc0w

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...

1vuio0pswjnm7

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

1vuio0pswjnm7

"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."