Meta is scaling back its employee tracking tool after staff backlash, according to an internal memo reviewed by The Information. The company is updating its Model Capability Initiative (MCI), launched in April to gather data on how employees complete computer tasks to train its AI models, by strengthening privacy protections, allowing some staff to request exemptions, and giving employees the option to pause the tracker for 30 minutes at a time. Some workers had resisted MCI by ignoring permission popups or disabling the software, while others complained it slowed their devices, and more than 1,500 staffers signed a petition calling on leadership to stop collecting their data. New protections include summarizing activity rather than capturing exact keystrokes and limiting raw-data access to a “handful of engineers.” CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said the workforce provides higher-quality training data than the contractors typically used by data-labeling firms.
